Crunchy Cucumber

Me = this × OpenID × Jaiku × photos × links × tweets × G+ etc.


Better JS docs  


Using physical partition on a USB disk with VirtualBox on Mac OS X

I wanted to use an external USB disk with a physical partition for a virtual machine in VirtualBox on my MacBook Air, and this isn’t obvious from the gui. So this is what I found out I had to do.

First, make sure that there is no partition on the disk. Then run this command:

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename \
  ~/Library/VirtualBox/usbdisk.vmk -rawdisk /dev/disk1 -register

You can now create a virtual machine and use usbdisk.vmk to install a new OS on.

Update: Later, OS X might auto mount the volume created during install. You must unmount this before you can start the virtual machine again.