This tutorial will try to explain how to mount a VirtualBox disk image (VDI) on Ubuntu 15.04 or Ubunu 14.04. It is possible to mount VDI disk on Ubuntu 15.04 with a little tweak. But make sure the virtual disk (VDI) is not being used by other virtual machine.
OK lets get started
First, we will use “nbd” kernel module. On standard Ubuntu installation, the nbd is not included. You can install this kernel module using this command
sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm
Next, load the nbd kernel module
sudo modproble nbd
Now execute this command to access the VDI disk
qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 /home/dhani/Downloads/ubuntu.vdi
Change /home/dhani/Downloads/ubuntu.vdi with your own vdi file. Now check the device with this command to see the partitions in the device
sudo fdisk -l /dev/nbd0
Output:
Disk /dev/nbd0: 20 GiB, 21474836480 bytes, 41943040 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x0006a7ccDevice Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/nbd0p1 * 2048 1026047 1024000 500M 83 Linux
/dev/nbd0p2 1026048 41943039 40916992 19.5G 8e Linux LVM
Now mount the partition for example
sudo mount /dev/nbd0p1 /mnt
The command will mount the partition of the VDI disk /dev/nbd0p1 to /mnt. Now the content of the partition will be mounted on /mnt.
After fdisk -l, i am getting disk … Doesn’t contain a valid partition table…
Works like a charm.