Booting VM Guest from existing bootable OS using raw disk

[petert]

Host is Mac OS X 10.10.5 Mac Pro Desktop using VBox 5.0.2

Yes I know raw disk access is for experts. But I seek clarification of VMDK (as per Ch 9.9 manual) of the following:

I have several partitions on different HD's. Each partition is the last bootable version of a previous release of the Mac OS X.
To check an app I am developing in a previous release I reboot the host machine and select the OS version (partition) to boot from.

But it seems reasonable to make VM's for those versions and then boot them as guests using the raw disk partition using VMDK.
It is not entirely clear to me if this is what is intended with VMDK - or whether it is meant only for use as a data store.

So the questions are:
1. Is booting a previous version of the OS via VMDK an intended use of the capability?
2. Does anyone in this forum have experience doing this?

TIA

Peter

[n.olsen.311]

Yes, I use it currently to boot a work PC on my Mac keeping all my enterprise apps contained and ready for use. I'd clone the hard drives first, just in case they get corrupted while attached as VMDK.

An interesting this I've run across is that the disk devices don't allow raw access so each time I reboot I end up doing the following.

Code: Select all

sudo chmod 777 /dev/disk7

Which is completely demoralizing from a security perspective, but until I find a persistent/secure solution, it does work.