Imaging physical drive using virtualbox, fog server (pxe boot) and sata/usb adapter.

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I have some spare drives and have a fog server for image deployment.

I wanted to copy my most common image to some spare hard drives over my usb/sata adapter.

  1. I used virtualbox to create a VM that uses raw device mapping to access my physical drive over usb.

I created the disk using the command below.  “C:\Users\username\VirtualBox VMs\Win7-test\Win7-test.vmdk” is the path to the disk ( a pointer file to the physical disk).  for me the disk was
PhysicalDrive2 and you check this in diskmanager.

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename "C:\Users\username\VirtualBox VMs\Win7-test\Win7-test.vmdk" -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive2

2. I set the boot to PIXE and boot the vm from my fog server and copied the image down to the drive.  I was alittle slow over usb 2.0 but was able to get the drive ready.