Mounting a raw partition located on a USB drive crash VBox on first partition access

[jehon]

I have a USB disk with 3 partitions. The first partition is a bootable btrfs partition. The second is a Fat32 system, the third one is encrypted.

I created a virtual disk to map the first partition: "c:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename rawusbdrive.vmdk -rawdisk
.\PhysicalDrive1 -partitions 1

I can added that physical drive to the VM. Like a charm.

When I start VB, it load Grub and fail (stop working with a message).

If I start VBox with a CDRom in it, it start correctly.

Other worth noting information: my whole configuration of the virtual machine is located on the same USB disk, on the second partition.

[jehon]

New test: moving the vbox and vmdk files to the main drive did not change anything.

Thought it could help to mention it.

[jehon]

If I map the whole drive, it goes further.

"c:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename rawusbdrivew.vmdk -rawdisk
.\PhysicalDrive1

But that seems dangerous to me since the guest will then try to mount partitions 2 and 3, and fail (they are already mounted in windows) -> potential heavy problems.

What would be the correct option?

[jehon]

By the way, it is extremely slow...

[jehon]

The problem of "extremely slow" has been solved by updating guest additions from 4.2.18 upto 4.3.6.

First good news

[aeichner]

Please reopen if still relevant with a recent VirtualBox release.