| 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>
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| 8 | While this variant is the simplest to set up, you must be
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| 9 | aware that this will give a guest operating system direct and
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| 10 | full access to an <i>entire physical disk</i>.
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| 11 | If your <i>host</i> operating system is also
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| 12 | booted from this disk, please take special care to not access
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| 13 | the partition from the guest at all. On the positive side, the
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| 14 | physical disk can be repartitioned in arbitrary ways without
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| 15 | having to recreate the image file that gives access to the raw
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| 16 | disk.
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| 17 | </p>
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| 18 | <p>
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| 19 | On a Linux host, to create an image that represents an entire
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| 20 | physical hard disk which will not contain any actual data, as
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| 21 | this will all be stored on the physical disk, use the
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| 22 | following command:
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| 23 | </p>
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| 24 | <pre xml:space="preserve">$ VBoxManage createmedium disk --filename <varname>path-to-file</varname>.vmdk --format=VMDK
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| 25 | --variant RawDisk --property RawDrive=/dev/sda</pre>
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| 26 | <p>
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| 27 | This creates the
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| 28 | <filepath><varname>path-to-file</varname>.vmdk</filepath>
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| 29 | file image that must be an absolute path. All data is read and
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| 30 | written from <filepath>/dev/sda</filepath>.
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| 31 | </p>
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| 32 | <p>
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| 33 | On a Windows host, instead of the above device specification,
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| 34 | for example use <filepath>\\.\PhysicalDrive0</filepath>. On a
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| 35 | macOS host, instead of the above device specification use for
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| 36 | example <filepath>/dev/rdisk1</filepath>. Note that on Mac OS
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| 37 | X you can only get access to an entire disk if no volume is
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| 38 | mounted from it.
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| 39 | </p>
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| 40 | <p>
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| 41 | Creating the image requires read/write access for the given
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| 42 | device. Read/write access is also later needed when using the
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| 43 | image from a virtual machine. On some host platforms, such as
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| 44 | Windows, raw disk access may be restricted and not permitted
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| 45 | by the host OS in some situations.
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| 46 | </p>
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| 47 | <p>
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| 48 | Just like with regular disk images, this does not
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| 49 | automatically attach the newly created image to a virtual
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| 50 | machine. This can be done as follows:
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| 51 | </p>
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| 52 | <pre xml:space="preserve">$ VBoxManage storageattach WindowsXP --storagectl "IDE Controller" \
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| 53 | --port 0 --device 0 --type hdd --medium <varname>path-to-file</varname>.vmdk</pre>
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| 54 | <p>
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| 55 | When this is done the selected virtual machine will boot from
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| 56 | the specified physical disk.
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| 57 | </p>
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| 58 | </body>
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| 59 |
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| 60 | </topic>
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