OT: creating disk image from existing disk for VirtualBox

[Nadav Har'El]

On Thu, Dec 06, 2012, Mord Behar wrote about "Re: OT: creating disk image from existing disk for VirtualBox":
> On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 9:26 PM, David Suna <david at davidsconsultants.com>wrote:
> > I have an old hard disk which ran Windows XP.  I would like to turn that
> > into something that I can run as a virtualbox client.  Does anyone know how
> > I would go about doing that?
> 
> I've never actually tried this, but the following line might work:
> dd if=/ of=/path/to/newImageFile.vdi

I assume you mean
	dd if=/dev/sdc of=...

with /dev/sdc the appropriate block device, not the mounted file system.
If you don't specify bs=, might as well use cp instead of dd, by the
way.

The result of this command will not actually be "vdi", but rather a raw
image format, usually named with the "img", not "vdi" extension.

You'll also have a problem with this image: It will have the wrong
drivers installed. I.e., you'll have drivers for the physical hardware
you had, not for the virtual hardware in the virtual machine. Hopefully
you'll have enough "generic" drivers installed to be able to install
the right drivers over the networks - otherwise you'll need to come up
with the original Windows installation disk. Also, With piracy-obsessed
MS-Windows, you may also have trouble because Windows thinks you copied it
to a different computer.


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Nadav Har'El                        |     Thursday, Dec 6 2012, 23 Kislev 5773
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