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Boot Camp and VirtualBox raw disk support not working anymore under High Sierra?

Under (the previous) MacOS Sierra, I had a working Boot Camp partition with Windows installed and I also was able to run the Boot Camp partition as a VM under VirtualBox with VBox's raw disk support. So before I installed High Sierra, I had the highly convenient setup of being able to boot to MacOS or to boot to Windows in Boot Camp or if I just needed to quickly run a Windows program in MacOS, I can run the VBox VM which runs the BootCamp partition through a raw disk pointer file without having to reboot MacOS.


After I installed High Sierra with the new APFS filesystem, it was not working. I tried re-partitioning the Boot Camp (basically ran Boot Camp Assistant again which deleted and re-created the Windows partition) and it worked. I was able to boot into Windows but it had the inconvenience of having to get out of MacOS (reboot). When I tried to recreate the VirtualBox raw disk file, it worked but this time if wouldn't boot the Boot Camp partition giving out an "INT18" Boot Failure error. I was able to verify that the raw disk .VMDK file was created successfully because I can access the Boot Camp partition from a different VM and had full read/write support.


Can anybody please who was able to do this successfully under High Sierra explain to me what they did? Thanks in advance.

macOS High Sierra (10.13), Boot Camp Windows

Posted on Oct 8, 2017 1:39 AM

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3 replies

Oct 8, 2017 11:53 AM in response to Loner T

I appreciate the quick reply LonerT. I have weighed the pros and cons and it would seem that the added benefits of APFS outweigh any quirky conveniences I used to have. 😉 Plus since it's the filesystem that all Apple devices are going to use from now on, I might as well jump on the bandwagon already.


But still, if somebody has a solution of being able to fully upgrade to High Sierra and still be able to boot into Boot Camp from a VM using a raw disk pointed to the the Boot Camp partition, it would be a sweet convenient feature to have. It worked great before High Sierra. I have posted in the VirtualBox forums as well hoping for a fix. For the moment, I just have to endure rebooting out of MacOS and into Boot Camp (Windows).

Boot Camp and VirtualBox raw disk support not working anymore under High Sierra?

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