virtualbox.org

Hello all,
I've got 1:1 hard disk copy (~40GB) in a file. I want to use this raw disk image as a hard disk for a VirtualBox guest. Is it possible ?

I went through VBoxManage commands like convert(from/to)raw, createrawdisc, storageattach, but no success - the first one attempts to recreate entire 40GB file, that is not suitable for me. When i want to use my physical disk however, it works. I even found this (google it please, i can't post URLs) and it would be a solution for me, but it is not working in VirtualBox as the resulting file throws an error like 'Strange format' - VERR_NOT_SUPPORTED.

My OS is Windows XP 32bit, VBox version 4.1.8
I think that this all works in Linux, but i cannot use Linux...

Torrentware? If yes, forget it. We dont support this.

I just did this - I took a HD (okay, it was a USB stick) and dumped it to a raw file, then used VBoxManage convertfromraw to make a VDI image of it. Since the default is a dynamically-allocated disk, I got a VDI that was considerably smaller than the raw image. Did you remember to zero unused sectors before you started?

On Windows hosts, CloneVDI with "compact" option enabled would be the easiest way to convert a raw image (see CloneVDI sticky in "Windows Hosts" forum). Ditto on Linux and Mac hosts, however Wine would be needed to run it there.