[SoaS] Another way to use VirtualBox and SoaS on a Mac

[Dave Bauer]

On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com>wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> Just thought I'd bounce another possible approach pass the list for using a
> regular Soas loaded USB stick on Mac OS X, this one has the obvious benefit
> of allowing you to use the same USB stick on different machines/locations.
> Now, VirtualBox's BIOS does not support booting from a USB stick
> unfortunately, but as it turns out there are some hidden ways to make
> VirtualBox boot what the documentation refers to as "raw disks" rather than
> regular VM disk images (Page 135 in the VB manual, 9.10 Using a raw host
> hard disk from a guest).
>
> *** Caviate lector, the USB stick I'm using does not seem to be saving
> changes between uses, I'm not sure if this is an issue with the stick I
> made, or this approach ***
>
> Here's the steps:
>
> 1) Plug in your soas-2-blueberry USB stick
>
> 2) In a terminal type:
>
>        df
>
> You should see a line that says something like the below, make a note of
> the /dev/disk1 it may be different on your Mac depending what hardware you
> have:
>
>        /dev/disk1       1206080   1206080         0   100%
>  /Volumes/soas-2-blueberry
>
> 3) Mac OS X must not auto mount the USB. If it does you can't create the
> needed vmdk to reference it (you'll get an "VERR_DEV_IO_ERROR"), and the
> documentation warns of potential file corruption if you allow both a host
> and guest OS to tinker with the same raw disk at the same time. The rather
> naughty trick is to go edit your fstab to prevent the specific stick from
> auto-mounting [I hope to find a non techy replacement for this step]:
>
>        sudo vim /etc/fstab
>
> ...and append the line:
>
>        LABEL=soas-2-blueberry none cd9660 ro,noauto 0 0
>
> 4) Now make sure to eject the USB volume from your desktop; unplug your
> soas-2-blueberry USB stick; plug it back in again to check. It should _NOT_
> appear on your desktop this time.
>
> 5) In Terminal run the below VirtualBox command, modifying the .vmdk save
> location, and your /dev/disk1 as needed. This will create a tiny little vmdk
> file that holds the description of the USB stick, and register it with the
> VB media manager so it's available as a disk:
>
>        VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename
> /Users/gary/Desktop/soas-2-blueberry.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk1 -register
>
> 6) In VirtualBox create and configure a VM as normal, you should see the
> soas-2-blueberry.vmdk listed as an available existing disk.
>
> 7) All done, time to boot...
>
> Regards,
> --Gary
>
> P.S. There's another way of getting VirtualBox to boot the USB stick on the
> Mac, but I'll give it a couple of tries before reporting back here.
>
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>



Gary,

There is an easier way!

I have created a Virtualbox VM that is basically the boot helper CD on a
very small virtualbox disk. This is programmed to look for the device named
FEDORA for boot.

1) Plug in USB
2) Open Finder. Eject USB.
3) Start Virtualbox VM
4) Click Devices Menu, Click USB Devices, select the USB stick.

I tried to write an Applescript to automate ejecting and connecting the USB
to the Virtualbox and ti works reliably on my Macbook but we had trouble
testing on other Macs.

Dave

-- 
Dave Bauer
dave at solutiongrove.com
http://www.solutiongrove.com
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