You’ll have to look at the sizes probably to determine which one is the drive you’re interested in. That will list all drives attached to your computer. From the Terminal enter this command: $ diskutil listĢ: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 999.9 GB disk0s2 Perhaps we can get that updated.įirst we have to know what to call our raw internal drive. Chapter 9 of the user’s manual describes how to do this but leaves one part out. The tricky thing here is that instead of having VirtualBox use a file on your hard drive to represent an entire guest operating system’s hard drive, you actually want it to have raw access to a real drive on your computer (your internal drive, presumably). If you don’t know about it yet, you might be pleased to learn you can run Windows applications right there on your Mac without having to reboot using Boot Camp.ĭownload and install VirtualBox. VirtualBox is a free tool from Oracle for running other operating systems in a window inside your computer. That will present you with a choice of bootable volumes (like grub, for the geeks out there). Restart your Mac and hold down the Option key. There are instructions for this sort of thing around the net. You’ll either have to install Mac OS X on the hard drive directly or use something like Carbon Copy Cloner to copy your installation over. If you have a spare, bare hard drive lying around, get an enclosure for it (I got some 2.5″ laptop HD enclosures for $7 each, shipped, on eBay). Get an external hard drive, a cheap one will do. Sun (now Oracle) VirtualBox didn’t support it, but starting with v1.4, it does. VM Fusion v2 didn’t support it (don’t know about the current version). Until recently I had no way to do the raw disk access in a virtualization tool. Setting up VirtualBox to point to your raw disk drive.Here are the key components for making this work: This makes it pretty much useless unfortunately. You might notice that it’s horribly slow: about 1MB/sec if there are no errors.

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