virtualbox.org

Win7 Host
VirtualBox 4.3.6
Ubuntu 12.04 Server Guest

Quick Backstory:
Ubuntu box of old has failed PSU. Boot disk had fresh install of latest Ubuntu release coming so I setup VBox with a fresh guest and installed 12.04. Old box had 2 sata drives I used for data formatted in EXT4. There is still data on these drives.

Question:
Can I mount the physical drives with no fear of data loss using the instructions in Ch. 9 of the manual?

If it is mounted as a raw disk will Ubuntu see the file system, or will I lose all data on those drives?

8.8.8.8 wrote:Can I mount the physical drives with no fear of data loss using the instructions in Ch. 9 of the manual?

I would rather suggest making VDI images of the drives and using the images in your new VM. That way you can experiment to your hearts content with no risk to the data remaining on the physical originals.

CloneVDI can image physical drives directly to VDI, though that isn't what it's designed for so the user interface won't be as friendly as could be. To image a physical drive on Windows hosts the source file name shoud be "\\.\PhysicalDriveN" (where N is the drive number), and the dest filename should be anywhere other than drive N. No other apps should be running, particularly any that might modify the drive while it's still being imaged. That the drive contains EXT4 partitions will not cause a probem for CloneVDI. Remember to turn on the "compact" option so that the images don't contain unused sectors. Even though it's only doing read operations, you may need to run CloneVDI "as administrator" in order to enable sector level access to the drive.