Has anybody had any luck using VBox to install a second system to a dedicated partition on the host system, rather than a dynamically allocated virtual hard disk? The reason I want to do this is that my computer has two drives, a 120 GB SSD to which I have my host Debian system installed, and a 1 TB HDD. As much as I dislike it, I occasionally have to use Windows. I have Debian installed on the SSD because it is much faster that way. However, I don't want Windows to use any space on the SSD because space there is limited. I could install Windows directly to the HDD, but I don't want to do this because I already have an LFS system installed to the first partition of that drive, and Windows will only install to the first partition of a drive. I'd have to move things around in order to get that to work. Secondly, I don't want to have to boot in and out of my Debian system every time I need to use Windows for something. I want to be able to use Windows through VBoxHeadless in a shell console, and then be able to switch between shell consoles from Debian to Windows.
I installed VirtualBox version 5.0.16 from the VBox website, using the .run file. I tried installing the .deb package first, but the installation wouldn't complete because it wanted me to install packages that are no longer in the repository. The .run installation completed successfully. I successfully installed the extension pack. I was able to install both Windows 10 and Windows 7 to a regular virtual hard disk on /dev/sda using VBox. Everything is working fine. However, I can't get VBox to install the machine to /dev/sdb4, which is where I want to install the system.
I tried using the features described in this documentation:
https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#rawdisk. I tried issuing the 'VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename </path/to/file.vmdk> -rawdisk /dev/sdb -partitions 4' commands both with and without creating a copy of the MBR and specifying the path to it (I don't think I should need this, since I am doing a fresh install of Windows). I have changed the permissions to 660 for /dev/sdb, /dev/sdb4, and all of the directories that would contain the VMDK file. I have changed the ownership of /dev/sdb and /dev/sdb4, as well as all of the directories, to <myusername>. However, the result of the command is sometimes 'Segmentation Fault' and sometimes 'Invalid command: 'createrawvmdk'.' I am obviously issuing the command as <myusername> and not root, which as I understand it is proper.
I've searched in various forums and they all indicate this should work, but all of the comments I have seen are pretty old and by users that are using versions of VBox 4.0 or older. Is this feature no longer present in VBox, and if not, is there some other way to accomplish this?