Privileges for raw partition access
Hello. I'm trying to set up a VirtualBox installation for virtualized Ubuntu. It works very well for regular virtual machines, but now I'm trying to grant the virtual machine access to the physical partitions with the vboxmanage utility, creating the disk descriptor like so: vboxmanage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename ubuntu.vmdk -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive0 -partitions 3,5,6 This instructs VirtualBox that the virtual machine can access partitions 3, 5 and 6 on PhysicalDrive0. Inside the VM, I can indeed see and read from the partitions, but as soon as I try to write to any of them I get these messages in the VM log: PIIX3 ATA: LUN#0: disk write error (rc=VERR_ACCESS_DENIED iSector=0x9240810 cSectors=0x80) (The VM is presented with a virtual PIIX3 controller, but my physical controller is a Promise RAID controller). I consider this a security problem because I am getting "access denied" messages even though I am running VirtualBox as an administrator. I have made sure that inside the VM I am mounting the partitions as read/write; it's almost certainly not a problem in the VM itself, but rather VirtualBox's access to the partitions. Any hints would be greatly appreciated.
September 18th, 2009 9:43am

Reinderien,Is your host operating system windows 7?If this is the case try to open anevelatedcommand prompt.And Execute the commands in the evelated command prompt.More info on how you open a elevated command prompt is avaible here:http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/783-elevated-command-prompt.htmlKind RegardsDFTIM me - TWiTTer: @DFTER
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October 23rd, 2009 1:40pm

If by evelated you mean elevated, then yes, I'd been trying that all along. The solution was to uninstall a third-party EXT3 driver that had apparently been interfering with partition access.
October 23rd, 2009 5:10pm

So toes this mean you got it to work?? I'm trying to do the same thing. I can read the physical partitions from Linux, but writing does not work.
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February 28th, 2010 9:27am

I figured out what my problem was: The partition was formatted as NTFS, so windows decided to invisibly mount it even though it wasn't assigned any drive letter. I went into linux and trashed the NTFS headers and everything worked great.
March 9th, 2010 9:50pm

Hi - I'm running in a 99% similar problem, except that I want to use Win7 as a host and WinXP as a guest (to do a "smooth" migration). I'm quite familiar with VB and raw partition mode (mailing mixing XP and Kubuntu, always worked fine). Here I have the problem you are describing, the VB logs says this is a writing error on the LUN#0. The VM is running "elevated", and I have no drive letter (nor directory) assigned to the XP partition, i.e. I assume it is not mounted, so Win7 should allow write access to it, but it seems it does not. Win7 is just a plain install, nothing added yet (I tried 3 times a re-install). It is an ultimate 64 and I'm using a raid-1 ICH9. To double check, I erased Win7 and installed instead a Kubuntu 9.10 and, of course, the exact same physical XP worked just fine, using the same VM configuration (just had to re-create a vdmk under Linux). This is driving me nuts, so in case you have an idea ... Thanks
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April 18th, 2010 8:48am

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