exporting a virtualbox VDI to a harddrive to boot it natively

I have a VirtualBox 3.1.2 image of Debian 5.0.2 running on Windows XP SP3. I would like to export that Debian image to a USB harddrive such that I could boot to that drive and run it natively. Is that possible to do with a VDI?

Solution 1:

You can export a VDI to a raw disk image with the following command:

VBoxManage clonemedium --format RAW debian.vdi debian.img

You can then use the dd command or any suitable disk imaging software to write the image to the disk.

Solution 2:

Since you are using Windows as your host system, you can proceed in 2 steps.

1. Convert your VDI into a raw IMG with the command:

   VBoxManage.exe clonehd --format RAW source.vdi destination.img
   

2. Then use a tool like HDDRawCopy to copy the raw IMG to your HDD.