[GUIDE][ALPHA] How to Access Your Windows 7 Boot from ML Without Rebooting Using VirtualBox

ALPHA PREVIEW: This is my first guide, and my first run at this guide in particular. It's possible I missed a step, was unclear about something, or otherwise messed up. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND that you read through the resources I posted first to get a sense of how I built this. Also, if some of the more tech-savvy people on the board could attempt this first and tell me where I messed up or was unclear, I'd appreciate it. I may update this with pictures as well.


I posted a few threads asking if anyone else has been able to do this. Getting no response, I fiddled around with VBox for a while before I was able to get it to work. This is really useful if you want to access your Windows boot without rebooting, usually for something simple/low-resource (i.e. not playing games ).


What you need:
1) VirtualBox (obviously)
2) Hardware virtualization enabled in BIOS - varies by BIOS, but Gigabyte's can be found under Advanced BIOS Features (I think - will double-check).
3) Plop Bootmanager


Resources (other websites I pulled info from about this):


https://kindlevsmac.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/how-to-run-windows-7-bootcamp-in-virtualbox/
http://wouter.kloos.me/2012/01/running-windows-7-from-the-bootcamp-partition-in-virtualbox/
http://phaq.phunsites.net/2011/03/05/sharing-windows-7-between-boot-camp-and-virtualbox/
http://luckyviplav.blogspot.com/2011/06/windows-7-on-mac-os-x-through-virtual.html


Instructions:


As I had it set up before, my computer is dual-booted between OS X ML and Windows 7 on the same drive. The process I used to get that set up was to install OS X and get it established on one partition on that drive, then boot from the Win7 install disk, install it to the other partition, then use the cmd prompt to direct Windows to boot from the Chimera partition. It's possible, though unconfirmed, that a lot of these steps won't be necessary if you installed Win7 onto a separate disk (totally speculating).


WARNING: if you read through some of the above posted guides, they warn you that some of these steps could result in ruining everything, destroying all your data, melting down your hard drive, and otherwise leaving you with a really sh*tty day. I am not responsible if you mess this up SO BACK UP EVERYTHING. Obviously. Now, here's what you do:


1) Unmount your Windows 7 drive - open terminal. Type 'diskutil list'. Find the partition associated with your Windows 7 drive (typically /dev/disk0s3 or /dev/disk0s4). Type 'diskutil unmount /dev/disk0s4' where /dev/disk0s4 is the disk you identified from the list previously.


2) Create a rawdisk access VMDK - change your directory to your VMs by typing 'cd /Users/[USERNAME]/Virtualbox\ VMs' where [USERNAME] is your username (obviously). Then enter this command:




Note 2 things: /dev/disk0 should reflect the information you pulled above and the number 3 at the end of '-partitions' should be the last number from /dev/disk0s3.


This will create a .vmdk which gives access to the Win7 disk called win7raw.vmdk. You can change the name when you create it by editing the command above. DON'T CLOSE TERMINAL - you'll want to stay in this folder for future commands.


3) Download the Plop bootmanager above and extract the .zip files. Place the plpbt.iso file from the main folder (not the Windows or Linux subfolders) into your Virtualbox VMs folder (for easy access - that will be the only file in that .zip you need).


4) THIS IS THE SCARY PART: make the unmounted Win7 partition read/writeable. Enter this command in terminal




Where /dev/disk0s3 is the same we've always been using.


5) Take control of .vmdk files by typing this command:




Replace [admin-user-name] with... yup, your admin user name. You'll be prompted to enter your password.


6) Make the .vmdk files read-writeable (you NEED to be in your VirtualBox VMs folder when you enter this command):




7) Create a VirtualBox VM - make sure you provide enough RAM (I bought 16GBs basically so I could do this, so I dedicate a full 8GBs to the virtual OS). I think Win7 needs at least 1GB, but correct me if I'm wrong. Add win7raw.vmdk as the existing hard drive.


8) Before you boot make sure the win7raw.vmdk is attached to the SATA controller. Also, attach the plpbt.iso file as a IDE disk. Lastly, make sure you give it more than one processor, or it'll run really slow (it's times like these I wish I had bought an 8-core, but I usually give it 3 of the 4 cores I have if I have nothing running in OS X, 2 of the 4 if I have Chrome or something else up).


9) Boot it up! It goes into a space-looking background with all of your partitions shown. Scroll down to the Windows 7 one (number 3 throughout this guide) and hit enter. If all goes well, it should boot into Windows!


NERDTALK: I was able to get this working when I dual-booted on my Macbook, but I had some problems with my Hackintosh. I was able to get access to the Win7 disk, but would get the boot0:GPT error when I booted into it. I figured the problem was that it was expecting to boot into Chimera, but given the way the Vbox was set up, it didn't really have access to that partition. I tried boot into that partition but it wouldn't let - though in retrospect, I think I could have unmounted and given Vbox access to the Chimera partition the same way I do for the Win7 partition above, instead of just creating the rawdisk access .vmdk. If anyone wants to play around with that, let me know how it goes, but I don't think I'm going any further than this, tbh. At that point, I just needed a bootloader I could run in Vbox, and here we are.

First problem - it recognizes it as having new hardware so any hardware-specific applications have problems, including the OS.