Booting OS/Ubuntu from an external Hard disk uisng Virtual Box virtual harddrive feature
First you need to boot from the hard drive
For that put the harddrive in an hardrive enclosure and connect it via usb to your host OS
Then follow the steps in the Virtual box help guide
9.9.1. Access to entire physical hard disk
While this variant is the simplest to set up, you must be aware that this will give a guest operating system direct and full access to an entire physical disk. If your host operating system is also booted from this disk, please take special care to not access the partition from the guest at all. On the positive side, the physical disk can be repartitioned in arbitrary ways without having to recreate the image file that gives access to the raw disk.
To create an image that represents an entire physical hard disk (which will not contain any actual data, as this will all be stored on the physical disk), on a Linux host, use the command
VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename /path/to/file.vmdk
-rawdisk /dev/sda
This creates the image /path/to/file.vmdk (must be absolute), and all data will be read and written from /dev/sda.
On a Windows host, instead of the above device specification, use e.g. \\.\PhysicalDrive0.
Creating the image requires read/write access for the given device. Read/write access is also later needed when using the image from a virtual machine.
Just like with regular disk images, this does not automatically register the newly created image in the internal registry of hard disks. If you want this done automatically, add -register:
VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename /path/to/file.vmdk
-rawdisk /dev/sda -register
After registering, you can assign the newly created image to a virtual machine with
VBoxManage modifyvm WindowsXP -hda /path/to/file.vmdk
When this is done the selected virtual machine will boot from the specified physical disk.
To resize the graphics window
cd /media/cdrom1
sudo bash ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run
To create a share from which you can copy files to and fro from the host to the guest hard disk
mount -t vboxsf vbox \mnt\
For that put the harddrive in an hardrive enclosure and connect it via usb to your host OS
Then follow the steps in the Virtual box help guide
9.9.1. Access to entire physical hard disk
While this variant is the simplest to set up, you must be aware that this will give a guest operating system direct and full access to an entire physical disk. If your host operating system is also booted from this disk, please take special care to not access the partition from the guest at all. On the positive side, the physical disk can be repartitioned in arbitrary ways without having to recreate the image file that gives access to the raw disk.
To create an image that represents an entire physical hard disk (which will not contain any actual data, as this will all be stored on the physical disk), on a Linux host, use the command
VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename /path/to/file.vmdk
-rawdisk /dev/sda
This creates the image /path/to/file.vmdk (must be absolute), and all data will be read and written from /dev/sda.
On a Windows host, instead of the above device specification, use e.g. \\.\PhysicalDrive0.
Creating the image requires read/write access for the given device. Read/write access is also later needed when using the image from a virtual machine.
Just like with regular disk images, this does not automatically register the newly created image in the internal registry of hard disks. If you want this done automatically, add -register:
VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename /path/to/file.vmdk
-rawdisk /dev/sda -register
After registering, you can assign the newly created image to a virtual machine with
VBoxManage modifyvm WindowsXP -hda /path/to/file.vmdk
When this is done the selected virtual machine will boot from the specified physical disk.
To resize the graphics window
cd /media/cdrom1
sudo bash ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run
To create a share from which you can copy files to and fro from the host to the guest hard disk
mount -t vboxsf vbox \mnt\
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