How to clone real HDD/Flash Usb as VirtualBox virtual disk with the same size?

Question

virtual box

The main problem is the difficulty in creating a virtual hard disk with a size identical to the size of a real storage device. The virtualbox graphical interface does not allow you to simply precisely set the size of a virtual disk.
In particular, if the size does not match, there are difficulties with reverse cloning. Many utilities (like Clonezilla) refuse to clone a larger drive onto a smaller drive (even if the difference is a few kilobytes). And with sector-by-sector copying, as I understand it, part of the data can be discarded.
In my case, you need to clone the thin client memory card in order to have a virtual machine with the Debian 8 operating system at hand, which was installed and configured for real hardware and its tasks. And to avoid problems with reverse cloning, the sizes of real and virtual storage must be identical.

Answer 1

The console interface provides such capabilities. You can directly convert the initial image itself:

VBoxManage convertdd sdb.raw sdb.vdi --format VDI
# затем обратно
VBoxManage clonehd sdb.vdi sdb.raw --format RAW

And you can immediately pick up a raw device, the GUI is missing. a dangerous thing for normal use. See section 9.9. advanced storage configuration