up vote 2 down vote favorite
share [g+] share [fb]

I want to format SD card from my Linux virtual machine. I have in-built SD card reader in my laptop. I tried using virtualbox and vmware player and installed ubuntu 10.04 guest. None of them are showing the sd card reader as a device. I can access the SD card from windows host. I am not interested in solutions using shared folders as I want to access sdcard as a hardware (it should show up in /dev).

I basically want to set up sd card for beagleboard, but don't want to install physical ubuntu in my PC.

link|improve this question
feedback

migrated from stackoverflow.com Jan 1 at 3:06

This question came from our site for professional and enthusiast programmers.

2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

You are most likely missing the extensions if your SD reader is using your USB controller.

enter image description here

Under File > Preferences, follow the pic. Add and point to the downloaded extension.

enter image description here

Restart your Virtual Machine and you should have access to USB devices.

link|improve this answer
Hi, I tried this solution and installed the virtualbox extension pack but still no success. I am doing this in macbook if that makes any difference. Also, in my macbook system profiler, the sd card reader is not listed under USB devices but as a separate category called "card reader". Also, I am able to see the devices which are listed under USB in virtualbox. – Punit Soni Jan 2 at 22:16
feedback
up vote 0 down vote

I've so far failed in finding a way to do this directly, even with a USB card reader (It put the card on /dev/dm-1 rather than the expected /dev/mmcblk1).

My workround was to create a 4G virtual drive in virtualbox. This could then (as /dev/sdb) take an install of Beagleboard Ubuntu as documented.

I then shut down the VM, converted it to a RAW DD file and used DD to put it on the card: (on the host Mac)

VBoxManage clonehd UbuntuBeagleImage.vdi UbuntuBeagleImage.dd --format RAW
sudo dd if=UbuntuBeagleImage.dd of=/dev/diskNUMBER

(/dev/disk2 in my case, but triplecheck as getting it wrong could bork your HD).

The dd command took about 1hr 20min!

Hope this helps - I'm still working towards an easier and quicker way - we shouldn't need to transfer 4G of data for 600M of OS.

link|improve this answer
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.