Windows Vista raw parition access using VirtualBox

[krish.arava]

Hi,

My Windows Vista OS is on Partition 1 (with Boot flag ON) and I am trying to boot it using RAW partition access
My partition tables entries are as shown below. I provided explicit access to partition 1 and created an mbr MyWindows.mbr

VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.1.0
(C) 2005-2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.

Number Type StartCHS EndCHS Size (MiB) Start (Sect)
1 0x07 0 /1 /1 1023/254/63 134893 63
4 0x83 1023/254/63 1023/254/63 85306 276269805
5 0x82 1023/254/63 1023/254/63 5718 450976743
6 0x83 1023/254/63 1023/254/63 68174 462688128
3 0x07 1023/254/63 1023/254/63 11144 602312704

I followed this excellent tutorial http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=9697 to create VMDK for Windows Vista.

But when I create VMDK using this command
"VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename rawDiskXP.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sda -partitions 1 -relative -mbr MyWindows.mbr"
VMDK created shows me full size harddisk of 300GB whereas it should have been only 131 GB.
If I try to boot Windows VISTA it throws me an 0Xc000000e Error. I understand the error and it is because of hard disk partition not being detected properly.

Please HELP me understand how to get past this error.

[jgabaldon]

But when I create VMDK using this command
"VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename rawDiskXP.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sda -partitions 1 -relative -mbr MyWindows.mbr"
VMDK created shows me full size harddisk of 300GB whereas it should have been only 131 GB.

You have specified the whole disk instead of just the partition...
In case that the windows partition is the first one, try with: /dev/sda1

Hope this helps...

J.