Unmounting Bootcamp to use as a drive for Virtual Box

Part of the instructions for setting up Virtual Box to boot from your Bootcamp drive on Mac OS X walk you through setting up a permanent approach to unmounting your Bootcamp drive. I didn’t follow those instructions, instead created a script that I can use to run manually to unmount and open the permissions when needed, i.e. when I want to boot from VirtualBox:

diskutil umount /Volumes/BOOTCAMP
sudo chmod 777 /dev/disk0s4

The instructions on some sites also assume that your Bootcamp drive is partition disk0s3, but on my machine it’s disk0s4. If you run ‘diskutil list’ you can get a list of your partitions to work out which is your Bootcamp partition.

Updating/adding kernel headers to Fedora to support VirtualBox Guest Additions

Installing VirtualBox Guest Additions on Fedora 16 and 17 fails because it looks like the kernel headers are not installed by default. After you’ve installed Fedora to VirtualBox, you can manually install the required kernel headers with these steps (summarized from this post)

sudo yum -y update kernel
sudo yum -y install kernel-devel kernel-headers dkms gcc gcc-c++

Reboot then install the VirtualBox Guest Additions from the Devices menu.

VirtualBox vdi disk image failed

I’ve had physical drives fail before, but this is a first. I’ve used VirtualBox on and off for years for those times when you need to fire up a guest os and it’s always worked fine, no issues. I just installed Fedora 16 on a new virtual drive image and on the first reboot after installing the VM crashed. After that point VirtualBox wouldn’t boot it any more saying the vdi headers were corrupt.

Wow, ok. Other than messing with headers physically in the image file, it appears there’s no repair options or tools. This is the first time I’ve seen this, so giving it the benefit of the doubt, I downloaded the latest version, 4.1.8, created a new vm and new disk image, and I’m installing again.