Passthrough Mounting A Physical Disk Drive in VirtualBox

Creating the Physical Disk VMDK

  1. Connect the physical disk to the host
  2. Log into the VirtualBox host
  3. Launch PowerShell as administrator
  4. Run the following commands
    # list physical disks
    Get-PhysicalDisk
  5. Take note of the disk number for the target disk to mount in VirtualBox
  6. Continue with the following commands
    # cd to the virtualbox installation directory
    cd "$ENV:ProgramFiles\Oracle\VirtualBox"
    # create a vmdk disk pointing to the target physical disk
    # usage
    # .\VBoxManage.exe internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename "<%fullpathto.vmdk%>" -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive<%disknumber%>
    .\VBoxManage.exe internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename "D:\VMs\SSD.vmdk" -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive2
    # launch virtualbox manager
    .\VirtualBox.exe

Attaching the Physical Disk to a Virtual Machine

NOTE: If you don't run VirtualBox Manager as administrator you will get permissions errors trying to access the physical disk

  1. Right click on the target VM > Settings
  2. Select Storage from the left navigation menu
  3. Click the Add Hard disk icon
  4. Click Add > Browse to and select the .vmdk file created earlier
  5. Scroll to the bottom of the listing and select the .vmdk > Click Choose
  6. Click OK to confirm the VM settings
  7. Right click on the target VM > Start

Documentation: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#rawdisk