Booting from hard disk partitions

[Bukov]

I'm trying to use the partition and windows XP installation created when I installed XP using Boot Camp.

There are a number of articles on how to do this, such as:
http://mesbalivernes.blogspot.com/2008/ ... sting.html

as well as section 9.9.2 Access to individual physical hard disk partitions in the UserManual.

Most of these seem to be aimed at unix or other OS's tho, and I'm having trouble making it work on Mac.

The idea seems to be to use the VBoxManage tool to create a .vmdk file pointing at the windows partition.

The first step would be to find the partition # of XP on my box:

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VBoxManage internalcommands listpartitions -rawdisk /dev/sda

is from the UserManual, but on my mac there IS no /dev/sda.

If I type "mount" into terminal, I get:

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/dev/disk0s2 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local)
fdesc on /dev (fdesc, union)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, automounted)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted)
/dev/disk1 on /Volumes/SIN_CITY (udf, local, nodev, nosuid, read-only, noowners)
/dev/disk0s3 on /Volumes/XP (msdos, asynchronous, local, noowners)

The last line is clearly the one I want: my XP partition. Clumsy attempts to do something with this haven't worked tho. I tried things like:
-VBoxManage internalcommands listpartitions -rawdisk /dev/disk0s3

But that did nothing.

So I gave up trying to get the # of my partition, and skipped straight ahead to the main part, trying to create the .vmdk, and just try guessing my partition #.

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VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename /Users/ericridgeway/Desktop/WinXPImg.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk0s3 -partitions 2

I also tried "-partitions 1".

None of this got me anywhere.

I'd much rather use VirtualBox then pay for Parallels or Fusion. But I really don't want to have to uninstall Bootcamp's copy of windows and never be able to use it again just so I can give the freed up license to my VirtualBox windows. I want them to use the -same- copy of windows, pointing at the already-created partition.

Can anyone help me with this or point me in the right direction?

[TerryE]

I am not a mac user but I have come across discussions on this. Search this forum for createrawvmdk. See http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic. ... 9627#19627 for example. I don't think they are yet supported in this beta, but check the introduction text of the mpkg-file