As an alternative to using virtual disk images as described in
With Oracle VM VirtualBox, this type of access is called raw hard disk access. It enables a guest operating system to access its virtual hard disk without going through the host OS file system. The actual performance difference for image files compared to raw disk varies greatly depending on the overhead of the host file system, whether dynamically growing images are used, and on host OS caching strategies. The caching indirectly also affects other aspects such as failure behavior. For example, whether the virtual disk contains all data written before a host OS crash. Consult your host OS documentation for details on this.
Raw hard disk access is for expert users only. Incorrect use or use of an outdated configuration can lead to total loss of data on the physical disk. Most importantly, do not attempt to boot the partition with the currently running host operating system in a guest. This will lead to severe data corruption.
Raw hard disk access, both for entire disks and individual
partitions, is implemented as part of the VMDK image format
support. As a result, you will need to create a special VMDK
image file which defines where the data will be stored. After
creating such a special VMDK image, you can use it like a
regular virtual disk image. For example, you can use the Virtual
Media Manager, see