VirtualBox Command Line Tricks

2016-02-17 by terryoy, in tricks

Sometimes we need to work with VirtualBox's command line tools to make things done. Here are a collections of tasks I encountered.

1. Converting an Linux .img format to a .vdi (VirtualBox disk)

$ VBoxManage convertfromraw mydisk.img mydisk.vdi --format vdi

2. Mount virtual disk on your ubuntu system

In linux, we can use a the qemu-nbd and kpartx to mount a .vdi file on a path. The qemu-nbd tool can create a block device to enable it to be share via NBD(Network Block Device) protocol. Then, we will use kpartx to create device maps from the partition tables of the device, which makes the partition of the image mountable.

# (prerequisites] install the dependencies
$ sudo apt-get install qemu-utils kpartx

# to mount the device
$ sudo modprobe -nbd
$ sudo qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 <vdi_file>
$ sudo kpartx -a /dev/nbd0
$ sudo mount /dev/mapper/nbd0p1 /mnt/<mount_point>

# delete the device when no longer needed
$ sudo umount /mnt/<mount_point>
$ sudo qemu-nbd -d /dev/nbd0

(…to be continued)