<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div><div><div>Hi all,<br></div><div><br>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.<br><br></div>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.<br><br></div>I tried using the features described in this documentation: <a href="https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#rawdisk" target="_blank">https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#rawdisk</a>.
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. <br><br></div>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?<br><br></div>Thanks,<br><br></div>Levi</div>