This came up the other day, how do you add a disk to VirtualBox that physically exists? E.G. you have created a test vbox and would like to plug in your old laptop hard drive and have a look at the contents..

Here goes..

sudo lsblk

And get the following similar output..

NAME                       MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINT
sda                          8:0    0 465.8G  0 disk  
|-sda1                       8:1    0   243M  0 part  /boot
|-sda2                       8:2    0     1K  0 part  
|-sda5                       8:5    0 465.4G  0 part  
  +-sda5_crypt (dm-0)      252:0    0 465.4G  0 crypt 
    +-mint--vg-root (dm-1) 252:1    0 465.4G  0 lvm   /
sdb                          8:16   1   7.5G  0 disk  
|-sdb1                       8:17   1   459M  0 part  /media/your-username/usbstick
sdc                          8:32   0 465.8G  0 disk  
|-sdc1                       8:33   0   243M  0 part  
|-sdc2                       8:34   0     1K  0 part  
|-sdc5                       8:37   0 111.6G  0 part  

Examine the tree and find out what your old hardware is called, e.g. /dev/sdc in this case.

Now create a directory for the virtual disk..

mkdir -p /home/your-username-here/VirtualBox/spare_disks

And use vBox’s commandline tools to create the image, changing /dev/sdX for your device location, prolly /dev/sdc.

sudo VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename "/home/your-username-here/VirtualBox/spare_disks/500GB-hard-disk.vmdk" -rawdisk /dev/sdX

Now chown and chmod the varioius relevant locations and that’s it..

sudo chown your-username-here:your-username-here /home/your-username-here/VirtualBox/spare_disks/500GB-hard-disk.vmdk
sudo chmod 777 "/home/your-username-here/VirtualBox/spare_disks/500GB-hard-disk.vmdk"
sudo chmod 777 /dev/sdX

Now open VirtualBox and add in the disk in the usual way (Select your box, then –> settings –> storage –> select disk controller –> click ‘adds hard disk’ icon –> Select vmdk file and that’s it. Fire up your machine and voila, the machine sees the external disk. Nice.