Will VirtualBox Use An Existing OS X Partition?

[ktappe]

My MacBook's HD is partitioned with a bootable version of OS X 10.6.3 on each. I want to be able to run one virtualized while booted from the other.

It's apparent from reading through all the forums that VirtualBox won't boot directly from a partition (not sure why--it seems a natural....)

So I've followed instructions for creating a raw .vmdk from a partition. I did the following:

* Unmounted the desired partition from Finder
* Used the vmboxmanage tool to create the .vmdk thusly:

Code: Select all

   bash-3.2# vboxmanage internalcommands createrawvmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk0s3 -filename osxraw.vmdk
   Oracle VM VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.2.0
   (C) 2005-2010 Oracle Corporation
   All rights reserved.

   RAW host disk access VMDK file osxraw.vmdk created successfully.

Problem is, I get an error when trying to use the image. VirtualBox's Virtual Media Manager complains:

Screen shot 2010-05-27 at 6.24.20 AM.png (49.9 KiB) Viewed 1505 times

I tried it with both the partition mounted and unmounted, and tried changing the permissions from 600 to 777 on the .vmdk but those did not help. What else can I try?

Thanks,
-Kurt

[E64oaf9PGf]

You probably do not start Virtualbox as root. Therefore you have to give your user read an write permissions on /dev/disk0s3.

(In 10.5. I added the group operator to my user and after each boot I do "chmod g+w /dev/disk0*"... I don't know how to make the latter thing permanent with OS X