How to convert flat raw disk image to vmdk for virtualbox or vmplayer?

On windows, use https://github.com/Zapotek/raw2vmdk to convert raw files created by dd or winhex to vmdk. raw2vmdk v0.1.3.2 has a bug - once the vmdk file is created, edit the vmdk file and fix the path to the raw file (in my case instead of D:\Temp\flash_16gb.raw (created by winhex) the generated path was D:Tempflash_16gb.raw). Then, open it in a vmware virtual machine version 6.5-7 (5.1 was refusing to attach the vmdk harddrive). howgh!

First, install QEMU. On Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu, run:

$ apt-get install qemu

Then run the following command:

$ qemu-img convert -O vmdk imagefile.dd vmdkname.vmdk

I’m assuming a flat disk image is a dd-style image. The convert operation also handles numerous other formats.

For more information about the qemu-img command, see the output of

$ qemu-img -h

Since the question mentions VirtualBox, this one works currently:

VBoxManage convertfromraw imagefile.dd vmdkname.vmdk --format VMDK

Run it without arguments for a few interesting details (notably the --variant flag):

VBoxManage convertfromraw

To answer TJJ: But is it also possible to do this without copying the whole file? So, just to somehow create an additional vmdk-metafile, that references the raw dd-image.

Yes, it's possible. Here's how to use a flat disk image in VirtualBox:

First you create an image with dd in the usual way:

dd bs=512 count=60000 if=/dev/zero of=usbdrv.img

Then you can create a file for VirtualBox that references this image:

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename "usbdrv.vmdk" -rawdisk "usbdrv.img"

You can use this image in VirtualBox as is, but depending on the guest OS it might not be visible immediately. For example, I experimented on using this method with a Windows guest OS and I had to do the following to give it a drive letter:

• Go to the Control Panel.
• Go to Administrative Tools.
• Go to Computer Management.
• Go to Storage\Disk Management in the left side panel.
• You'll see your disk here. Create a partition on it and format it. Use FAT for small volumes, FAT32 or NTFS for large volumes.

You might want to access your files on Linux. First dismount it from the guest OS to be sure and remove it from the virtual machine. Now we need to create a virtual device that references the partition.

sfdisk -d usbdrv.img

Response:

label: dos
label-id: 0xd367a714
device: usbdrv.img
unit: sectors

usbdrv.img1 : start=          63, size=       48132, type=4

Take note of the start position of the partition: 63. In the command below I used loop4 because it was the first available loop device in my case.

sudo losetup -o $((63*512)) loop4 usbdrv.img
mkdir usbdrv
sudo mount /dev/loop4 usbdrv
ls usbdrv -l

Response:

total 0
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 0 Apr  5 17:13 'Test file.txt'

Yay!