virtualbox.org

I'm trying to set up virtual slave drives in Virtual Box. When I boot the guest OS, all that shows up is the primary ( obviously, since it boots ). I tried it in 3 different OSs. Ubuntu, Fedora, and Windows 7 Beta. It showed up in Ubuntu as unknown. No file size or anything. And it couldn't mount. Right now I'm trying to use them in Windows 7 Beta. I create the virtual drives in Virtual box. I tried them as SATA and IDE. The master always works, but the slaves don't. When I tried them all with SATA, it installed the SATA drivers, and prompted me to restart, so I did. But they still didn't work afterwards. With IDE, they just didn't show up.

So my question to you, is how do I make the guest OS recognize the virtual slave drives?

- Kaz

Actually this isn't so much a VB issue as an OS one. You have exactly the same issue if you just plug a HDD into a physical machine.

Let's take Windows first. You need to tell Windows to use the new disk. In XP you do this through My Computer->Manage->Disk Manager. This allows you to allocate partitions on the new disk(s), format them and assign drive letters. Once you've done this then Windows will remember these settings.

In the case of Linux, you need to use fdisk (or one of the other partition formatting utilities) to set up the partitions on the new disk(s). You then need to format them (e.g. with mkfs.ext3), create mount points and update your /etc/fstab to automount them.

If you google (e.g. linux format disk ext3) you will find articles on how to do this.

Ah, thanks a bunch man. I got it working perfectly.