[clue] Using a dedicated partition for VBox install

[Quentin Hartman]

I've done this in the past (about 3 years ago) so I could use a Windows
partition running natively or via virtualization as needed. It worked ok,
but activation between the two states became an issue (as one would
expect). Unless you are also needing to run bare metal Windows for some
reason, it really is much simpler to just run a normal VM with virtual disk
containers. The performance hit on disk IO is pretty negligible once the
disk space is allocated.

In my case, I ultimately ended up switching to VMware because for my
application (3D stuff) the performance in virtualbox wasn't good enough.

QH

On Mon, Mar 7, 2016 at 11:21 AM, Levi Darrell <levidarrell at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Has anybody had any luck using VBox to install a second system to a
> dedicated partition on the host system, rather than a dynamically allocated
> virtual hard disk? The reason I want to do this is that my computer has two
> drives, a 120 GB SSD to which I have my host Debian system installed, and a
> 1 TB HDD. As much as I dislike it, I occasionally have to use Windoze. I
> have Debian installed on the SSD because it is much faster that way.
> However, I don't want Windoze to use any space on the SSD because space
> there is limited. I could install Windoze directly to the HDD, but I don't
> want to do this because I already have an LFS system installed to the first
> partition of that drive, and Windoze will only install to the first
> partition of a drive. I'd have to move things around in order to get that
> to work. Secondly, I don't want to have to boot in and out of my Debian
> system every time I need to use Windoze for something. I want to be able to
> use Windoze through VBoxHeadless in a shell console, and then be able to
> switch between shell consoles from Debian to Windows.
>
> I installed VirtualBox version 5.0.16 from the VBox website, using the
> .run file. I tried installing the .deb package first, but the installation
> wouldn't complete because it wanted me to install packages that are no
> longer in the repository. The .run installation completed successfully. I
> successfully installed the extension pack. I was able to install both
> Windows 10 and Windows 7 to a regular virtual hard disk on /dev/sda using
> VBox. Everything is working fine.  However, I can't get VBox to install the
> machine to /dev/sdb4, which is where I want to install the system.
>
> I tried using the features described in this documentation:
> https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#rawdisk. I tried issuing the
> 'VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename </path/to/file.vmdk>
> -rawdisk /dev/sdb -partitions 4' commands both with and without creating a
> copy of the MBR and specifying the path to it (I don't think I should need
> this, since I am doing a fresh install of Windoze). I have changed the
> permissions to 660 for /dev/sdb, /dev/sdb4, and all of the directories that
> would contain the VMDK file. I have changed the ownership of /dev/sdb and
> /dev/sdb4, as well as all of the directories, to <myusername>. However, the
> result of the command is sometimes 'Segmentation Fault' and sometimes
> 'Invalid command: 'createrawvmdk'.' I am obviously issuing the command as
> <myusername> and not root, which, as I understand it, is proper.
>
> I've searched in various forums and they all indicate this should work,
> but all of the comments I have seen are pretty old and by users that are
> using versions of VBox 4.0 or older. Is this feature no longer present in
> VBox, and if not, is there some other way to accomplish this?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Levi
>
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