disk management

[Preston Hagar]

On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 12:00 PM, Verde Denim <tdldev at 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