[VBOX] Failure while attaching the physical hard drive to the guest

[Bernhard Fröhlich]

Am 04.05.2013 03:20 schrieb "Yuri" <yuri at rawbw.com>:
>
> I have a Linux guest with VDI hard drive.
> I want to attach the physical (on host) hard drive to this guest.
>
> So I created the ada3.vmdk pointing to /dev/ada3:
> VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename ada3.vmdk -rawdisk
/dev/ada3
> Then I ran this command to attach ada3.vmdk to the machine Mint-mate-32:
> VBoxManage storageattach "Mint-mate-32" --storagectl "SATA" --port 1
--device 0 --type hdd --medium "/home/yuri/VirtualBox
VMs/Mint-mate-32/ada3.vmdk"
>
> This added another HardDrive in Mint-mate-32.vbox:
> <HardDisk uuid="{408da1c6-8939-42d3-a03b-da6d3c4d36ad}"
location="ada3.vmdk" format="VMDK" type="Normal"/>
> And also this hard drive's description under <StorageController
name="SATA" type="AHCI" PortCount="2" useHostIOCache="false"
Bootable="true" IDE0MasterEmulationPort="0" IDE0SlaveEmulationPort="1"
IDE1MasterEmulationPort="2" IDE1SlaveEmulationPort="3">:
>      <AttachedDevice type="HardDisk" port="1" device="0">
>         <Image uuid="{408da1c6-8939-42d3-a03b-da6d3c4d36ad}"/>
>       </AttachedDevice>
>
> However, this machine fails to start now: VERR_ACCESS_DENIED on ada3.vmdk
> No further explanation, except NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
> Log provides no further insight also.
>
> Hard drive is recognized by the host system as:
> ada3 at ahcich7 bus 0 scbus7 target 0 lun 0
> ada3: <WDC WD1600BEVT-22ZCT0 11.01A11> ATA-8 SATA 2.x device
> ada3: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)
> ada3: Command Queueing enabled
> ada3: 152627MB (312581808 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)
>
> How can I get information what the error actually is?
> Is such operation reasonable? Is it supposed to work?
>
> Yuri

My first guess is that permissions for /dev/ada3 are not sufficient for
your vbox user.