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I am running Fedora on a VirtualBox. Sometimes to allow for performing some real hardware testing, I need to run my development environment on a physical machine. So I need the hard disk of the virtual machine (the .vdi file) to be interchangeably working on both the virtual machine itself and my physical PC by booting a bootable image, mounting the vdi file, and then chrooting to it.

I thought this was easy to achieve but it seems not. I hope to find an answer here.

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You can mount it as a loopback device. Tools you can use are just 'mount' or 'losetup'. The trick is knowing the required offset. For that you need 'vditool' or 'vdiinfo'.

Here is a nice article that explains it well:

http://muralipiyer.blogspot.com/2008/02/mounting-virtualbox-vdi-disk-authentic.html

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Is this for fixed drives only, or will it work for expanding type VDI's (has anyone tried?) – Scott Szretter Jun 18 '11 at 14:25
This is for fixed disks only. This method will not work with dynamic disks. – Goyuix Jun 18 '11 at 16:43
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