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Can we possibly get a *working* example

Posted: 16. Oct 2015, 02:48
by OrlandoNative
Of creating a Windows guest utilizing a complete raw disk for a Solaris VirtualBox host?

There seem to be *tons* of examples for Windows hosts, Linux hosts, even Mac OS hosts, but while Oracle "owns" both VirtualBox *and* Solaris there isn't much in the way of examples for setting up VM's on a Solaris host.

What I'm trying to do is to create a raw (ie dedicated) hard drive for a Windows VM. After a *lot* of searching, I managed to successfully create the .vmdk file (at least it said so).

cat c2t1d0.vmdk
# Disk DescriptorFile
version=1
CID=729b5831
parentCID=ffffffff
createType="fullDevice"

# Extent description
RW 1953525168 FLAT "/dev/rdsk/c2t1d0p0" 0

# The disk Data Base
#DDB

ddb.virtualHWVersion = "4"
ddb.adapterType="ide"
ddb.geometry.cylinders="16383"
ddb.geometry.heads="16"
ddb.geometry.sectors="63"
ddb.uuid.image="329db5f3-754f-43a6-81d4-a68c3e82ef8e"
ddb.uuid.parent="00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"
ddb.uuid.modification="00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"
ddb.uuid.parentmodification="00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"

I'm using the VirtualBox GUI 4.3.18 r96516 (Yes, I know there's newer versions/releases), but I started trying this a while back and just got back to looking at it).

Note the vmdk above says adapterType= "ide" Not sure why, since the disk is on a SATA controller, and the controller I want to attach it to is SATA, as well.

Anyway, going into the GUI and attempting to attach the disk gives:

Failed to open the hard disk file /home/rwesterv/VirtualBox VMs/Windows/c2t1d0.vmdk.
Permission problem accessing the file for the medium '/home/rwesterv/VirtualBox VMs/Windows/c2t1d0.vmdk' (VERR_ACCESS_DENIED).

Result Code:
VBOX_E_FILE_ERROR (0x80BB0004)
Component:
Medium
Interface:
IMedium {05f2bbb6-a3a6-4fb9-9b49-6d0dda7142ac}

Looking at the .vmdk file, it's permissions were rw....... (ie r/w only by owner) and since the vboxmanage command ran as root, the owner was, unsurprisingly, root.

I tried a few things - changing ownership to the user/group the vms run under; changing the permissions to 644, etc. I've seen (in searches) something about adding the vbox user to the "disks" group, but that group doesn't exist; so that's not an option. (The user running VirtualBox is defined in corporate LDAP - not explicitly on this particular Solaris host - so making changes to it isn't really the best option, if it's even realistically possible.) From the reading, I suspect that's only for Linux and maybe Mac OS anyway.

Any ideas (or even an example from scratch) that might get this working?