[ale] how do I boot a Virtualbox vm from a USB HDD

[Tim Watts]

OK, tried it. It works. Booted Kubuntu live cd image in a VM from USB
drive. No special tweaking. LILO boot loader is on the USB image.

One special note: Might want to add yourself (or whoever will run the
VM) to the 'disks' group so you can get rw access on the device. Kind of
scary, I know. Otherwise you'll have to do the whole shebang as root
(scarier). Once you add yourself, logout and login to make the
membership take effect. [That's so "windows" but I haven't found a
better way yet.]


On Tue, 2010-08-17 at 15:34 -0400, Tim Watts wrote:
> Haven't actually tried this with a flash drive but I would start by
> looking here:
> 
> http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#id2685036
> 
> You can boot from a partition. I've done this successfully to boot my XP
> image from /dev/sda2. I would imagine a similar thing can be done with a
> flash drive (which on my system appears as /dev/sdb).
> 
> I had to tweak the boot sector used by the VMDK so it would use an MBR
> from the original XP install instead of Grub. But maybe that's
> because /dev/sda is also the same drive as my main Linux image...
> 
> You need at least version 3.2. The version in the 10.04 repository is
> 3.1. Get it from the virtualbox site.
> 
> 
> On Tue, 2010-08-17 at 14:38 -0400, Ron Frazier wrote:
> > I may not be able to experiment with this for a few days, but I wanted to 
> > go ahead and put this out to see what you guys think.  Thanks in advance 
> > for responses.  I need to capture screen images to work on the slides 
> > mentioned in the Linux Fest post above.  I need to capture them from a 
> > virtual machine running in Virtualbox inside of Ubuntu 10.04.  Now, I know 
> > I can do that by hitting print screen.  The catch is that the system I'm 
> > testing is too large for CD or for the virtual HDD inside the virtual 
> > machine.  I have to boot the virtual machine from an external USB HDD 
> > attached to the host, but the virtual machine boot screen only allows 
> > booting it from the virtual HDD, CD, or network.  Any idea how I can get 
> > the virtual machine to boot from USB?
> > 
> > Sincerely,
> > 
> > Ron
> > 
> > --------------------------
> > (PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to 
> > call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy 
> > mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new messages very quickly.)
> > 
> > Ron Frazier
> > 
> > 770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
> > linuxdude AT c3energy.com
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Ale mailing list
> > Ale at ale.org
> > http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> > See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> > http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
> 
> ________
> To know that you do not know is the best.
> To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease.
> -- Lao-tzu
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo

________
When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the
human race.
-- H. G. Wells
__O
_-\<,_
(_)/ (_)