installing on a physical drive with virtualbox/Windows
To use a physical disk drive directly in Virtualbox you need to first create a special vmdk file to reference the physical drive and then assign the vmdk file as a drive to your VM. Section 9.5.1.1 of the VirtualBox user manual shows how to create the vmdk file. More info here: http://agnipulse.com/2009/07/boot-your-usb-drive-in-virtualbox/
This section provided all info I needed to do this
http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#rawdisk