| 1 | <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
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| 2 | <!DOCTYPE topic PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DITA Topic//EN" "topic.dtd">
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| 3 | <topic xml:lang="en-us" id="rawdisk-access-entire-physical-disk">
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| 4 | <title>Access to Entire Physical Hard Disk</title>
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| 5 |
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| 6 | <body>
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| 7 | <p>While this variant is the simplest to set up, you must be aware that this will give a guest operating system
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| 8 | direct and full access to an <i>entire physical disk</i>. If your <i>host</i> operating system is also booted from
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| 9 | this disk, please take special care to not access the partition from the guest at all. On the positive side, the
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| 10 | physical disk can be repartitioned in arbitrary ways without having to recreate the image file that gives access
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| 11 | to the raw disk. </p>
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| 12 | <p>On a Linux host, to create an image that represents an entire physical hard disk which will not contain any
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| 13 | actual data, as this will all be stored on the physical disk, use the following command: </p>
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| 14 | <pre xml:space="preserve">$ VBoxManage createmedium disk --filename <varname>path-to-file</varname>.vmdk --format=VMDK
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| 15 | --variant RawDisk --property RawDrive=/dev/sda</pre>
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| 16 | <p>This creates the <filepath><varname>path-to-file</varname>.vmdk</filepath> file image that must be an absolute
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| 17 | path. All data is read and written from <filepath>/dev/sda</filepath>. </p>
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| 18 | <p>On a Windows host, instead of the above device specification, for example use
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| 19 | <filepath>\\.\PhysicalDrive0</filepath>. On a macOS host, instead of the above device specification use for
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| 20 | example <filepath>/dev/rdisk1</filepath>. Note that on Mac OS X you can only get access to an entire disk if no
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| 21 | volume is mounted from it. </p>
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| 22 | <p>Creating the image requires read/write access for the given device. Read/write access is also later needed when
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| 23 | using the image from a virtual machine. On some host platforms, such as Windows, raw disk access may be restricted
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| 24 | and not permitted by the host OS in some situations. </p>
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| 25 | <p>Just like with regular disk images, this does not automatically attach the newly created image to a virtual
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| 26 | machine. This can be done as follows: </p>
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| 27 | <pre xml:space="preserve">$ VBoxManage storageattach WindowsXP --storagectl "IDE Controller" \
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| 28 | --port 0 --device 0 --type hdd --medium <varname>path-to-file</varname>.vmdk</pre>
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| 29 | <p>When this is done the selected virtual machine will boot from the specified physical disk. </p>
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| 30 | </body>
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| 31 |
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| 32 | </topic>
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