Today I wanted to copy a disk-image to a Virtualbox-disk(VDI) using dd. In this article I am going to describe how I managed to access the disk from the Linux command-line, copied the image and mounted a VDI-disk-partition
Binding the disk
First of all I had to bind the disk as a block-device. I used a very handy module named “Network Block Device”. Therefore I needed to load the kernel-module:
modprobe nbd
If the nbd-module was loaded, I could connect the disk using qemu-nbd:
qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 myfancydisk.VDI
Using the block-device
After binding the disk as a network-block-device, I had a disk-device to write on. So I just run dd to copy my image:
dd if=superdisk.img of=/dev/nbd0 bs=4M
Of course it would be possible to partition the disk using cfdisk:
cfdisk /dev/nbd0
Mounting a partition
I could also mount one of the partitions of my VDI-Disk:
mount /dev/nbd0p1 /mnt/tmp
Or umount it again:
umount /mnt/tmp
Disconnecting the VDI-Disk
To disconnect the VDI-disk, I ran qemo-nbd with the following parameter:
qemu-nbd -d /dev/nbd0
