phaq

I seemed to be aware about this previously, however there were some helpful bits which concluded the image for me personally, thanks for your time!

[...] a follow-up to my previous posts on sharing Windows 7 in BootCamp and VirtualBox and launching a VirtualBox VM directly through an icon [...]

I very much appreciated your post “Sharing Window 7 between Boot Camp and VirtualBox.” It is by far the clearest explanation of how to go about this I have found on the Web. Unfortunately, I got hung up at the “sudo chmod /// /dev/disk0s3” step.

I have a mid-year 2011 iMac (SSD primary drive and 1T spinning secondary drive) running Lion. Windows 7 is installed on the Bootcamp partition which is on the SSD. Bootcamp is the third partition on the SSD (Mac OS Recovery, Mac OS and Win7). I performed the Disk Utility step you suggested to revel the Disk Identifier of my Bootcamp partition and discovered it was “disk0s4”. So naturally I substituted 4 for 3 in your sudo … example. I got the following error message
“Invalid file mode: ///”

Could you please suggest what I should do to correct this problem?

Also, I discovered using Disk Utility that even though my Bootcamp partition is NTFS formatted it was mounted. I also got the above error message if I unmounted the disk before I typed the sudo command.

Though I can’t image it makes any difference, I had renamed the BOOTCAMP drive “Win SSD”

I am new to the Mac world, so any suggestion you can offer would be appreciated.

[...] over at phaq has written a great and easy-to-follow tutorial to get VirtualBox up and running your Bootcamp partition. I’m not going to plagiarize and [...]

Ma la macchina virtuale utilizza il vero disco rigido o uno virtualizzato? se io scrivo un file da windows nativo e poi accendo la macchina virtuale, me lo ritrovo li o devo creare una cartella condivisa?

You probably missed the “chmod” command.

Please check back with the partition ID you looked up from Disk Manager.
Depending on your setup, it may be something like ‘disk0s3′ or ‘disk0s4′ or similar.

As stated in the single steps, you need to apply write permissions to the partition ID, like this:
“sudo chmod 777 /dev/disk0s3″ or “sudo chmod 777 /dev/disk0s4″ or whatever may be right for your system.

If you don’t run the “chmod” command, you WILL get the VERR_ACCESS_DENIED. Also, keep in mind that you
need to add the startup script as described, which sets these permissions during every startup, or you will
get VERR_ACCESS_DENIED again. This change does NOT survice a reboot!

The check the permissions of your bootcamp partition, run this command from the Terminal: “ls -l /dev/disk0s3″ (or use /dev/disk0s4 or whatever applies to you).

You may get an output like this:

brwxrwxrwx 1 root operator 14, 3 22 Jan 17:29 /dev/disk0s3

Note the “brwxrwxrwx” at the begging? This is what it must look like. It simply wont work otherwise.

And yes, some come commands simply don’t give you a “Done” or “OK” message.

You could always try to run a commands like this: “sudo chmod 777 /dev/disk0s4 ; echo $?” by adding ” ; echo $?” (that’s “semicolon echo dollar question mark”)

This would give you a number back, where ’0′ (zero) usually means “everything ok” while any other number denotes an error running the command.
A few commands also have a “-v” switch, which means “be verbose”, but that’s not a universal rule. But in general, if you run a command that does not give you
any output, then everything it’s fine. Most of them bail out with a terrible error message if something was really that wrong.

Ciao Lorenzo,

Ma si, la macchina virtuale usa la partizione fisica del disco rigido. Non si sta creando un disco rigido virtuale, solo un riferimento alla partizione raw.
Allora quarda le dimensioni dei file sul mio computer:

du -h *.vmdk
4,0K bootcamp-pt.vmdk
4,0K bootcamp.vmdk

Si riferiscono alla partizione raw.
Adesso Windows nel Boot Camp e Windows nel VirtualBox può accedere alla stessa partizione fisica. C’è una sola installazione di Windows

Ciao,
Gianpaolo

I keep getting in virtual box:

Failed to open the hard disk /Users/xxxx/win7raw.vmdk.

The medium ‘/Users/xxxx/win7raw.vmdk’ can’t be used as the requested device type.

Result Code: NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0×80004005)
Component: Medium
Interface: IMedium {53f9cc0c-e0fd-40a5-a404-a7a5272082cd}
Callee: IVirtualBox {c28be65f-1a8f-43b4-81f1-eb60cb516e66}

I redid everything and now it says
Failed to access USB subsystem
could not load the usb proxy service
verr_general_failure

Result Code:
NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0×00004005)
Component:
Host
Interface:
IHost {dab4a2b8-c735-4f08-94fc-9bec84182e2f}
Callee:
IMachine {5eaa9319-62fc-4b0a-843c-0cb1940f8a91}

I followed all the instructions on preparing the rawdisk, even checked using “ls -l /dev/disk0s3″. The response I got is:

brwxrwxrwx 1 root operator 14, 3 25 Jan 11:35 /dev/disk0s3

Yet when I try running the VBoxManage command I get the errors:

VBoxManage: error: Cannot open the raw disk ‘/dev/disk0′: VERR_ACCESS_DENIED
VBoxManage: error: The raw disk vmdk file was not created

I’m using VirtualBox version 4.1.8 r75467.

What am I missing?

Thanks for your time and effort.

Rafi

The reason these people are getting permissions errors is because you suggested they run VBoxManage as their user account instead of as sudo.

VBoxManage requires write access to the raw block device /dev/disk0 for the raw disk creation process. In the future it’s not needed but the VBoxManage command needs to be run with sudo to work. If you look at the tutorials you cited they did correctly use sudo in this step.

Also rc.local is run as root during boot so there is no reason for the sudo in front of the chmod command.

Can’t help you too much about that particular error, but on the fast track I found a possible resolution for you in this post:

https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=41005

Maybe that’s gonna help you with the USB issue.

Your partition should show up with its real size in VirtualBox.
From the size you state, I suppose you have accidentally selected the OS X Lion recovery partition.
On a default system, disk0s3 tends to be the recovery partition.
Thus your Bootcamp will likely be disk0s4, or even different.

Please check with disk manager that you selected the correct partition.

Make also sure, that you use the correct partition with the VBoxManage command as well.

disk0s3 must be “partitions 3″
disk0s4 must be “partitions 4″
etc.

Thanks for your reply. My BOOTCAMP partition is labelled disk0s4. I unmounted the drive. In the VBoxManage command I used partitions 4. I changed the owner to admin user. But when I create a new VM and select te vmdk file it shows as 698 GB!

Not sure what is going wrong here. Your help is very much appreciated.

Regards
Raja

To sum my latest findings please note, that the size of the hard drive seen in VirtualBox _must_ be the real size of the _complete_ hard drive, and not the size of the the single bootcamp partition.

So even if your setup may look like a 120 GB SSD (decimal notation) of which let’s say 30 GB Bootcamp, 90 GB OS X are allocated, creating the ‘vmdk’ file will show up in VirtualBox with a size of approx 112 GB (binary notation), so to speak the complete hard disk.

Despite of that, VirtualBox will only be able to access the single Bootcamp partition (the one given by the ‘–partions __n__’ statement).