windows 10 physical disc virtual machine on mint 17.2 host

[jcm1107]

I have a laptop that has windows 10 and Mint 17.2 Rafaela dual boot. I use mint all the time and want to point a virtual machine to the windows 10 partition. I have been trying the commands in 9.9 advanced storage configuration of the user manual. The following commands when ran with sudo do produce a virtual machine that I can not access. Yes I did change /path/file to the location of my choice.


VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename /path/to/file.vmdk
-rawdisk /dev/sda

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename /path/to/file.vmdk
-rawdisk /dev/sda -partitions 1,5

First the permissions are not correct so I used chmod and chown to make them not root. I am not very familiar with changing permissions so this may be the issue. I have tried different users, and gave them full access and still get an error message when I try to add them as a hard drive using the GUI. the error reads: failed to open the disk image file "path/file"
details, with drop down.
Permission problem accessing the file for the medium "path/file"
(VERR_ACCESS_DENIED)

There is a bit more to this error message, I can post it if necessary.

[jcm1107]

I thought I would update this with my progress and information I have found. I have been unsuccessful in booting the physical partition of windows 10 into virtualbox. I am thinking this may be a permission issue even though I used sudo chmod 777 for the virtual machines created. I have since perused other options. I downloaded the windows 10 64 bit iso, this installed easily with the virtual machine. Runs perfect except it says it is not activated. I still have my windows 10 on the physical partition that will dual boot if I need it but I don’t know if I will use it again so I have copied anything important to a drive and can access it from mint or the virtual machine. I am unable to transfer my programs, this may be my ignorance of windows.

I feel I can reinstall anything I need to in the unactivated virtual machine and boot into the windows partition if I ever need to. I don't like this workaround as I feel It is a waste of the 137 gig of space that I was able to shrink windows partition to. It is ok as I do have a terabyte hard drive just seems a waste of space. I think I am unable to activate windows in the virtual machine because windows probably sees this as a significant hardware change and wants me to buy another copy. I fail to see the advantages of activating windows as it is functional so far. I would rather move my activation to the virtual machine than dual boot with windows as I will most likely never boot into that partition again.

If it is not possible to move the activation to a virtual machine on the same computer and windows requires another licence for the same computer I feel this is very ridiculous!!!!