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Hey, Is it possible to add phsical disks to virtial box's. Im running a server 2003 file server and and have been playing about with a virtual server 2008 box. I would really like to upgrade but my RAID card does not have any drivers available beyond server 2003. So, if i install it i wont be able to see my RAID 1 set up, Ive also got an ide raid card in there too, just basicaly built it a while ago and packed it with disks. Wanting to upgrade to server 2008 isnt just something that i feel like doing, ive been having an ongoing issue with my windows 7 client and network drives via my server 2003 os (LONG STORY) So could i potentially side step this obstical and add the physical volumes i currently have in to the Virtual server 2008 os?

Raw disk access is described in the manual.

mpack wrote:Raw disk access is described in the manual.

Thanks mate thats brilliant. Only im using Windows server 2k3 and im a little stuck with the instructions:

To create an image that represents an entire physical hard disk (which will not
contain any actual data, as this will all be stored on the physical disk), on a Linux
host, use the command
VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename /path/to/file.vmdk
-rawdisk /dev/sda
This creates the image /path/to/file.vmdk (must be absolute), and all data will
be read and written from /dev/sda.
On a Windows host, instead of the above device specification, use e.g.
\\.\PhysicalDrive0. On a Mac OS X host, instead of the above device specification
use e.g. /dev/disk1. Note that on OS X you can only get access to an entire
disk if no volume is mounted from it.
Creating the image requires read/write access for the given device. Read/write
access is also later needed when using the image from a virtual machine.
Just like with regular disk images, this does not automatically register the newly created
image in the internal registry of hard disks. If you want this done automatically,
add -register:
VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename /path/to/file.vmdk
-rawdisk /dev/sda -register
After registering, you can assign the newly created image to a virtual machine with
VBoxManage modifyvm WindowsXP -hda /path/to/file.vmdk


I dont have a Linux pc... or is ther another way?

simulous wrote:I dont have a Linux pc... or is ther another way?

Did you actually read what you quoted?

simulous wrote:To create an image that represents an entire physical hard disk (which will not
contain any actual data, as this will all be stored on the physical disk), on a Linux
host, use the command
VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename /path/to/file.vmdk
-rawdisk /dev/sda
This creates the image /path/to/file.vmdk (must be absolute), and all data will
be read and written from /dev/sda.
On a Windows host, instead of the above device specification, use e.g.
\\.\PhysicalDrive0.

Note that Vista (and probably Windows 7) don't allow physical access to a mounted drive because of the security implications. I think it's possible if you dismount the drive first. However, I never use raw disks so I've never tried to find out the details.

Sorry, i actually realised just after my post. I got it all working now thank you