With the virtual hard drive just created, boot the virtual machine with the android-x86 image in the optical drive.

https://i.stack.imgur.com/1zEQG.jpg

Once you boot, you can see the grub menu of the Live CD

https://i.stack.imgur.com/GkjJr.jpg

Choose the Debug Mode Option, then you should see the shell prompt. This is a busybox shell. You can get more shell by switching between virtual console Alt-F1/F2/F3.

Create two partitions by fdisk (some other versions would use cfdisk). Format them to ext3. Then reboot:

# fdisk /dev/sda

Then type:

“n” (new partition)

“p” (primary partition)

“1” (1st partition)

“1” (first cylinder)

“261” (choose a cylinder, we’ll leave 50% of the disk for a 2nd partition)

“2” (2nd partition)

“262” (262nd cylinder)

“522” (choose the last cylinder)

“w” (write the partition)

#mdev -s
#mke2fs -j -L DATA /dev/sda1
#mke2fs -j -L SDCARD /dev/sda2
#reboot -f

When you restart the virtual machine and the grub menu appears and you will be able edit the kernel boot line so you can add DATA=sda1 SDCARD=sda2 options to point to the sdcard or the data partition.