Question: Interacting with physical drives in VBox

[Alex @ Seltec]

What I am trying to do:
I work as a tech and am currently using a few old systems to image drives, test hard drives, etc... This is an issue as I often end up with a backlog due to not being able to work on enough drives at the same time. Now, rather than eating up my limited bench space with more systems, I am attempting to use an old IBM server with several SATA backplanes as a means to do more or less all of my HDD servicing in one place. The idea is to be able to connect a drive to the system, allocate it to a VM, start the VM and boot whatever utility I need (Ghost, Acronis, Seatools, etc...). I would also like to clone some of my standard images to vmdk files so that I can store them on said server as opposed to a bunch of loose drives.

Some problems I am having:
When doing some testing for the above I have noticed a few issues. 1) When testing hard drives via VBox I will get a clean test on known faulty drives. It seems to me that the VM is not letting the software properly interact with the drive but I am not certain. 2) After some initial tests successfully cloning drives on VBox I started getting crashes while running ghost. At this point I decided to come to the forums and see if what I was attempting is even possible. I found some similar questions that had gone unanswered so I'm posting this. Is it even possible to do this or does VBox not allow this sort of direct interaction with physical hardware?

[noteirak]

Virtualbox is a hardware virtualizator, so it's the whole purpose of it to not show the real hardware to the guest OS.
When you do some test, you actually test the emulator of a hardrive for physical fault, which it won't have any since it's virtual.

I don't think there is a way to do what you want with any virtualizator out there.