Installing an OS to a physical hard disk using a VM

Alright, this is a quickie. In an ill-fated attempt to install OS/2 Warp 4.52 to the bespoke IGEL D210 thin client, I relearned that you can use a physical hard disk (or to a CF card, or any other block device for that matter) with a virtual machine. And it’s not even that hard!

With QEMU you can simply do this (as root):

# qemu-system-i386 \
    -m 256 \
    -boot d \
    -cdrom mcp2-refresh-boot-en.iso \
    -drive format=raw,file=/dev/sdb \
    -net nic,model=rtl8139

The format=raw part is necessary to inform qemu that we want it to treat the file as a raw block device rather than as a disk image.

With VirtualBox you can do the following (as root):

# VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk \
    -filename igel-cf.vmdk \
    -rawdisk /dev/sdb

This will create a fake VMDK that points to the raw device (/dev/sdb in this case), provided you run VirtualBox with superuser privileges.