Using a physical drive on a virtual machine

[rez]

I got this working by running virtualbox as root:

sudo virtualbox

This gave me a new virtualbox instance but none of my machines were present, I simply had to browse to where my virutal box machines are stored and add in the one I needed and then it allowed me to add the new VMDK image without problem. Booted and could see the real disk like it was installed in the VM!

[Martin]

On many Linux distributions it should be enough to add your normal user to the "disk" group instead of running Vbox as root.

[gmchenry]

Did you add the "vboxuser" to your username group?

[jmlm-1970]

It seems that your user account also needs to be part of the disk group member:

sudo usermod -a -G disk