Next, you’ll need to find the path and drive number of the physical drive you’d like to mount: Choose all options as normal, but when asked about the virtual hard drive, select Do not add a virtual hard drive. You’ll first want to create a VM within the VirtualBox GUI. And no matter which drive or partition you want to mount, it’s always a good idea to back up any existing data on it before continuing. Warning: Do not attempt to mount or boot the partition that runs the host OS with a VM, as that can lead to severe data corruption. We’ll show how to do this when running VirtualBox on a Windows, Linux, or macOS host machine. This method is called VirtualBox “ raw hard disk access.” This allows you to mount or boot additional storage such as a secondary hard drive or external USB.
How to Enable VirtualBox Raw Hard Disk Access This tutorial will only discuss mounting entire VirtualBox physical hard disks. VirtualBox can mount entire physical hard disks as well as only selected partitions of a drive. Though it’s possible to create a virtual hard disk image from the existing contents of a physical drive, you might find it useful to directly mount or boot a physical drive on a VM.Īnd while this is fairly easy to do with the GUI of VMware and Hyper-V when configuring a VM, that isn’t the case with creating a VirtualBox physical disk, or a VirtualBox raw disk, in VirtualBox, as the process requires some command-line interface (CLI) usage.
While virtual machines provide many benefits, such as increased security and flexibility, there are times when you may need to use a physical hard drive with your VM. VirtualBox is a popular open-source virtualization software that allows you to create and run virtual machines (VMs) on your computer.
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