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

[Chris Fowler]

I've never played with VB but your post has got me going :(


I have this USB sound card I want to allow the guest access too but VB
is reporting "Unavailable".   Nothing I'm running is using this sound
card but possibly the pulse audio system is.  Is there a way I can tell
the host (Ubuntu 10.04) to ignore it so that VB can grab it?

Chris
 
On Tue, 2010-08-17 at 16:22 -0400, Tim Watts wrote:
> 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
> > > 
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