Is it possible to boot from a physical drive?

[jbs30000]

I'm sorry if this has been asked and answered before. I did some searching but didn't come up with anything.

I gave a computer of mine to someone else, but took out the hard drive. I've been thinking that instead of putting it in a new computer It would be nice if I could put it in this one and then boot it from VirtualBox.

I guess if need be I could copy the contents of the drive to a virtual hd, but it would be better if I could just use the physical hard drive instead.

So, is it possible? Thank you.

[jbs30000]

Doing a lot more Google searching I see it's referred to as raw hard disk access.

[mpack]

Raw hard disk access is usually a terrible idea, a dangerous technique of last resort for use by experts only. IMHO the only valid reason for using it is in a dual boot scenario in which the same drive is used both natively and inside a VM.

What you should do instead is make a virtual image of the physical drive using the likes of Disk2VHD. Even CloneVDI has a rudimentary drive image P2V feature, though it does allow you to go directly to VDI format.

Once you have the drive in virtual form you can then use it without the raw disk access complications

[jbs30000]

I don't want to put a 20 gig vhd on my C drive, but I may have to.

The hard drive has Windows Server 2003 on it and it freezes on booting. So when I tried to see what was wrong it turns out the drive is seen as being unallocated (so why Windows at least starts to load is a mystery).

[BillG]

If you are worried about filling up your hard disk you do not need to store the vdi in any particular place. You could store it on the "old" disk drive. It does not have to be on the system disk.

[jbs30000]

Yeah. I did that. I made a vhd copy on my C drive, erased the old drive and am going to put the vhd file back on it. I'm still curious why the vmdk file didn't work right, but I guess it doesn't matter now.

[mpack]

I don't want to put a 20 gig vhd on my C drive, but I may have to.

As you will have found by now, a 20GB drive is usually considerably smaller than that once converted to VHD. I suggest that you should next convert the VHD to VDI using CloneVDI before much time has passed. Why? I could give you the long version, but VDI simply works better in VirtualBox.

Is the drive you are running this image from an external one, eg. mounted in a USB caddy? If so I should warn you that you'll get terrible performance from it compared to a native drive, but I guess that's ok if you only make light use of it.

[pete_l]

I gave a computer of mine to someone else, but took out the hard drive. I've been thinking that instead of putting it in a new computer It would be nice if I could put it in this one and then boot it from VirtualBox.

Two points: First, if you no longer have the computer are you still entitled to use the O/S it was running? If the O/S was a non-free (i.e. licensed) one who still has that license?
Second point, I tried this with my W2K disk when I decided that an old P166 + 64M machine would no longer cut it. Since I have a retail copy of the O/S, that wasn't tied to a particular hardware instance there were no copyright/piracy issues. However I found that just pulling the disk out of the old machine and sticking it in the new one and trying to access it as a VB raw disk simply didn't work. For a start I had problems with the disk's UUID. Then I had problems that too many pieces of hardware that the old machine used, weren't there, so it refused to boot from inside VB. Due to mistakes I made trying to fix these dependencies, I screwed the registry so badly the VM halted/crashed irrecoverably. In the end, I decided to just reinstall the O/S once I had wiped the disk, sorted it's UUID, introduced it to VB and got it to boot - while making sure my BIOS didn't try to boot it first!
If you don't put a monetary value on the hours it will take you to sort this, it might just make sense to turn it into a VB raw disk. If you're a better VB-er than me you might also be able to transfer it across without losing your implementation.
If it's a linux O/S, I'd recomemnt just adding it to the pool of storage on your new machine, creating a non-raw VB instance and reinstalling the O/S and applications from fresh.

[jbs30000]

I don't want to put a 20 gig vhd on my C drive, but I may have to.

As you will have found by now, a 20GB drive is usually considerably smaller than that once converted to VHD. I suggest that you should next convert the VHD to VDI using CloneVDI before much time has passed. Why? I could give you the long version, but VDI simply works better in VirtualBox.

I'll look at your link. I used the vhd for a while yesterday. I had to do a repair reinstall to get my mouse and keyboard to work in the new virtual environment, but now everything seems to be running just fine.

Is the drive you are running this image from an external one, eg. mounted in a USB caddy? If so I should warn you that you'll get terrible performance from it compared to a native drive, but I guess that's ok if you only make light use of it.

No, it's an hd for desktops. It's an older one, 40 gigs, but it works just fine.

[jbs30000]

I gave a computer of mine to someone else, but took out the hard drive. I've been thinking that instead of putting it in a new computer It would be nice if I could put it in this one and then boot it from VirtualBox.

Two points: First, if you no longer have the computer are you still entitled to use the O/S it was running? If the O/S was a non-free (i.e. licensed) one who still has that license?
Second point, I tried this with my W2K disk when I decided that an old P166 + 64M machine would no longer cut it. Since I have a retail copy of the O/S, that wasn't tied to a particular hardware instance there were no copyright/piracy issues. However I found that just pulling the disk out of the old machine and sticking it in the new one and trying to access it as a VB raw disk simply didn't work. For a start I had problems with the disk's UUID. Then I had problems that too many pieces of hardware that the old machine used, weren't there, so it refused to boot from inside VB. Due to mistakes I made trying to fix these dependencies, I screwed the registry so badly the VM halted/crashed irrecoverably. In the end, I decided to just reinstall the O/S once I had wiped the disk, sorted it's UUID, introduced it to VB and got it to boot - while making sure my BIOS didn't try to boot it first!
If you don't put a monetary value on the hours it will take you to sort this, it might just make sense to turn it into a VB raw disk. If you're a better VB-er than me you might also be able to transfer it across without losing your implementation.
If it's a linux O/S, I'd recomemnt just adding it to the pool of storage on your new machine, creating a non-raw VB instance and reinstalling the O/S and applications from fresh.

I just went ahead and made a virtual disk copy of my hard drive. It's Windows Server 2003 and I'm just using it for practice experience to help find IT work. After making a vhd and then reinstalling Windows to get the proper drivers everything seems good now.