disk management
 

I have an extern sata drive that i want to use for virtual box machines. Currently the drive is unformatted (ubuntu 10.04 sees the drive).
do i need to format the drive (or a portion of it) in order to add virtualbox devices to it since virtualbox will part and format what it needs for each individual machine?


Thanks for the input.

Jack

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disk management
 

On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 12:00 PM, Verde Denim <tdldev@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have an extern sata drive that i want to use for virtual box machines.
> Currently the drive is unformatted (ubuntu 10.04 sees the drive).
> do i need to format the drive (or a portion of it) in order to add
> virtualbox devices to it since virtualbox will part and format what it needs
> for each individual machine?
>
> Thanks for the input.
>
> Jack
>

Yes. Typically, virtual box "drives" are single .vdi files stored on
a file system. There are methods to make a "regular" file system on a
drive appear to virtual box through a custom .vdi file, but they are
generally hackish (in my opinion) and not the way it was intended to
be done.

I would recommend formatting the drive as ext3 or ext4 and the
mounting it somewhere (maybe /mnt/vboximages or something). When you
start up virtual box, you will have the option to create a new disk
image. When it asks you where to save it, save it to where you
mounted your external sata drive.

Hope this helps.

Preston

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disk management
 

On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 1:09 PM, Preston Hagar <prestonh@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 12:00 PM, Verde Denim <tdldev@gmail.com> wrote:

> I have an extern sata drive that i want to use for virtual box machines.

> Currently the drive is unformatted (ubuntu 10.04 sees the drive).

> do i need to format the drive (or a portion of it) in order to add

> virtualbox devices to it since virtualbox will part and format what it needs

> for each individual machine?

>

> Thanks for the input.

>

> Jack

>



Yes. *Typically, virtual box "drives" are single .vdi files stored on

a file system. *There are methods to make a "regular" file system on a

drive appear to virtual box through a custom .vdi file, but they are

generally hackish (in my opinion) and not the way it was intended to

be done.



I would recommend formatting the drive as ext3 or ext4 and the

mounting it somewhere (maybe /mnt/vboximages or something). * When you

start up virtual box, you will have the option to create a new disk

image. *When it asks you where to save it, save it to where you

mounted your external sata drive.



Hope this helps.



Preston


Helps much! Thanks for the feedback, Preston.

Jack


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disk management
 

On 28 June 2010 18:00, Verde Denim <tdldev@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have an extern sata drive that i want to use for virtual box machines.
> Currently the drive is unformatted (ubuntu 10.04 sees the drive).
> do i need to format the drive (or a portion of it) in order to add
> virtualbox devices to it since virtualbox will part and format what it needs
> for each individual machine?
>
> Thanks for the input.

VirtualBox does not directly do anything to drives. The virtual drives
of virtual machines are stored as ordinary files in an ordinary
filesystem. You can use any filesystem Linux can write: ext3, ext4,
FAT32, NTFS, whatever you like. Ext4 might be best as the files will
often be large, and FAT32 is not ideal as it cannot accommodate files
>4GB.

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