Attaching a Block Device To VirtualBox VM (Misc)

Category: Misc

I sometimes want to be able to attach a USB disk to my laptop and then pass the entire block device (e.g. /dev/sdb) through to a Virtualbox VM - for example, to do an OS install for a headless system that doesn't have a functioning graphics card.

The VirtualBox UI doesn't provide an option to do so, however the VBoxManage command supports creating a virtual hard disk file which is mapped to a specific device path

Details

  • Language: Misc

Snippet

cd ~/VirtualBox
VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename sda.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sda