http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2012/04/29/virtualbox-convert-raw-image-to-vdi-and-otherwise/ VirtualBox - convert RAW image to VDI and otherwise Posted on April, 29 2012 by milosz VirtualBox command-line interface (VBoxManage) provides an easy way to convert raw disk image to the VDI/VMDK format and otherwise. Let's assume that we have raw image of the sdb device: $ sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=./sdb.raw To use it with VirtualBox we need to convert it to the VDI format (note the "Fixed" format -- if you don't specify this, you get a "dynamic" disk which might not work. The input is a fixed-size image, so it makes sense to convert it to a fixed size disk.): $ VBoxManage convertdd sdb.raw sdb.vdi --format VDI --variant Fixed (If this doesn't work and gives VERR_VD_INVALID_TYPE or VERR_INVALID_PARAMETER, try: $ VBoxManage convertdd sdb.raw sdb.vdi --format VDI --variant Standard,Fixed ) To use it with VMware we need to convert it to the VMDK format: $ VBoxManage convertdd sdb.raw sdb.vmdk --format VMDK Convert between VDI/VMDK formats: $ VBoxManage clonehd sdb.vdi sdb.vmdk --format VMDK $ VBoxManage clonehd sdb.vmdk sdb.vdi --format VDI Convert to the RAW image: $ VBoxManage clonehd sdb.vdi sdb.raw --format RAW To find out the offset of the disk, in a fixed-size VDI (the "offData" field): $ VBoxManage internalcommands dumphdinfo [NameOfImage].vdi Alternative solution to get back raw image after applying modifications is to use qemu-img command from qemu package: $ qemu-img convert -f vmdk sdb.vmdk -O raw sdb.raw Now we can write image to the device: $ sudo dd if=./sdb.raw of=/dev/sdb