Installing FreeBSD on Physical Disk But Won't Boot

[MrPaul]

I'm attempting to install FreeBSD on a physical disk that I will then put into a different computer. Unfortunately, I cannot connect both a hard drive & cd drive to the other device because the IDE connector is propritary and the cable only has a single connector.

My hope was to install the OS directly to the hard drive then remount the drive into the other case and off I go. However, I don't think it's updating the MBR because when the drive reboots in Virtualbox it says no OS found. I've also tried placing the drive into the other case and I get the same error.

[MrPaul]

OK and what does that have to do with VirtualBox?

Good point...I gave too much information. Let me simplify so we're just talking virtualbox.

When I install FreeBSD onto a physical hard drive on an OS X host the install completes properly but when I reboot I get no OS found. The install completes without an error.

I created a VMDK using VBoxManage using the physical drive "/dev/disk1"

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename HD.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk1

Then I started VirtualBox 4.0 (OS X Host) and associated the VM with this new VMDK. Mounted the FreeBSD ISO (4.11-RELEASE-i386-miniinst.iso) in the CD drive and powered it on. Installed OS, ejected ISO from CD drive, then rebooted. When I power on it says missing operating system.

[Perryg]

As it normally would. You need to copy the ISO to the host and install it in the guest.
After you have a working VDI file you would convert it to to RAW and then transfer that to a real HDD.
Search v2p using google.
you can also search here by using v2p site:forums.virtualbox.org as your search phrase. Plenty of people have done it.