Using Virtual Box to emualte a Physical / Real hard drive.

I recently setup a new computer to use at work, moved the hard drive from my old one with Windows8 onto it. And decided to try to boot it from VirtualBox rather than having to dual boot when I needed to work on windows software. *using it for windows phone 8 development*

Turns out its possible,

An awesome guide here.
http://www.theunixtips.com/virtualbox-use-raw-disk-to-load-windows-under-linux

Windows 8 will notice your hardwares different and you will need to repair the bootloader and os with the cd.

Just use these commands which I found out about here: http://www.tweakhound.com/2012/11/13/how-to-fix-the-windows-bootloader/

bootrec /fixmbr (writes mbr but does not overwrite partition table)
bootrec /fixboot (writes new boot sector to system partition)

Then you will be able to use Windows8 from your operating system. In my case Linux Mint 15 Cinnamon.