Enable writing to STDOUT with VBoxManage clonehd in raw format

[wildbug]

It would be nice to be able to stream a virtual disk to STDOUT in raw format. This would be the opposite of the 'convertfromraw stdin' command.

I was unable to do this using VBoxManage 3.1.6 on a Linux host. I tried using '-' as the output filename; I tried using a named pipe with and without the --existing option. All of these attempts failed with various errors.

For example, the scenario in which I found myself looking for this functionality was where an operating system refused to install itself to anything less than a complete disk. I installed it to a virtual disk through VirtualBox and wanted to stream the first/primary partition to a partition on the physical hard drive. Something like:

# VBoxManage clonehd /tmp/nexenta.vdi - --format RAW | dd of=/dev/sda4 bs=512 skip=63

...but, of course, this doesn't currently succeed. I realize this can be done with an intermediate step of creating a raw image file, but if there is not enough disk space, this is not possible.

[aeichner]

There is a standalone vbox-img tool now which supports what you want, closing as fixed.