Mount a .vdi in Windows 7 as a hard drive?

Question

On my Windows 7 machine (host), I have a virtual machine (VirtualBox) running Ubuntu 10.10 - inside the .vdi, I have some large files that I would like to extract - one of them being a standalone .iso file.

I want to mount Ubuntu's .VDI as a hard drive in my host system, Windows 7. How can I do this?

Solution

It sounds like you are making things much more complicated than it should be.

If you want to bring files over to your host system, the easiest way is to create shared folders between the host and guest. You can then transfer the file to the host OS and extract it there.

If you must mount this disk as a hard drive, you can convert it to VMDK and mount it that way.