Sandboxing Windows 7 for customer's data.

Alright, so I've been going through this idea through my head a few times.

Imagine the following:
1 computer running Win 7. inturn is hosting a VM box, running Win xp as well.

Is it possible to connect a USB to sata connection (See picture) that'll go directly to the VM Box?

I ask this because I'd like to make sure if I backup someone's data prior to working on it. I'd like to contain infections to the VM box instead of possibly infecting my own computer.

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Comments

NotHackingYou

IDK if it helps, but on Mountain Lion running Parallels, I can connect hardware and it 'plugs in' to the Windows VM if I tell it to. When its directed to Windows, I can't access it from the Mac side, though I haven't tried very hard.

varelg

What do you mean by "directly to VM"? There is an option in VBox to allow guest OS access to host's
USB ports. Whether xp as a guest would be able to access the USB of the host is a different story. I attempted once to have xp as a guest OS and it wasn't a pleasant experience...

ptilsen

Yes, the VM could access the hardware directly using VirtualBox, VMware Player/Workstation, or XP Mode/virtual PC (a free, supported feature of 7 Pro, Ent, and Ult). Really, most any modern virtualization software has the feature in some form.

However, I really don't see any need for this, and it would not be helpful to the experience. Directly passing through hardware in this case will probably reduce performance compared to, say, doing a file share between the VM and the host. At least, in my experience, passing through USB hardware (specifically USB) typically yields horrible, awful, terrible performance.

As far as the risk to your own machine, I see no risk. Unless your host machine is going to autorun media without prompting -- which Windows 7 won't, unless you have configured it to -- there is no risk from simply mounting the operating system. There is no feasible way the act of mounting the drive will result in the execution of any malware stored on it -- other than, again, autorun.

I would mount the drive on the host and share it to the VM.