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I am running Ubunbtu 12 with virtualbox 4.1 installed. I have two disk drives installed. One is a smaller solid state drive (120 GB) and the other is a 1 TB drive. I setup all of Ubuntu to run off of the SSD (35 GB) and left the rest of the SSD unpartioned.

Is there a way that I can setup a virtual Windows 7 machine to parallel the setup I did with Ubuntu? That is, I would like to have the Win 7 OS installed on say another 35-45 GB of the SSD drive, but then use the normal harddrive for everything else.

If it isn't clear already, I am not an expert here! So any level of detailed instructions (if this is possible) would be hugely appreciated!

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The answer is a plain YES.

It is possible. I'm running windows xp on virtualbox with three 5gb partitions - Drive C: system; Drive D: DATA; Drive E: Reserve. I did it for experimental purposes. You can also network you guest Windows 7 with your host Ubuntu just like a normal physical lan.

I hope that helps.

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  • Not sure that this answers my question, but I may be reading it wrong. It seems like your virtual XP machine has three disks. I have two physical disks on my server box and want a virtual machine on the non-boot drive. If you know how to do this could you please include the steps you used? Thanks in advance. Nov 26, 2012 at 23:34
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You want to run windows 7 in a virtualbox, installed on the same disk you have your host operating system (Ubuntu).

short answer: yes!

Just go forward and install, create a dynamic or static hard drive image (you'll understand this when creating it) on your SSD and you are good to go.

You can access all of your drives by adding them to your network drives under the settings for the virtual machine, then in the guest windows 7 you can map network drives. This way, w7 think it has network drives which really is physical drives on the computer, making them equally fast to access

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  • I have used virtual box before and done what you suggest. That is not what I want. What I want is to have the virtual image have access to two of my real physical drives - hence my question. Having it have access to the single drive does make sense, but I am looking for more. Is this possible?
    – user1609258
    Aug 18, 2012 at 20:52
  • See updated answer
    – chwi
    Aug 18, 2012 at 22:13
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You May be looking for an advanced feature known as raw hard disk access. This presents a physical storage device to your guest and comes with a slew of gotchas (you probably need admin/root privileges) and warnings (no snapshot support / easily trash your drive). You should read the section from the manual completely to make sure you understand what this special format really means before using it.

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

Generally you are much better off accessing your host drives through the shared folder feature when possible.

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