OT: creating disk image from existing disk for VirtualBox

[E.S. Rosenberg]

2012/12/6 Nadav Har'El <nyh at math.technion.ac.il>:
> 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.
I think you can safely change "may" to "you will".
You're better off reinstalling the Vbox with winXP then trying to
clone the existing system.

If you do want to try cloning the system you may also want to look at
the vmware migration tool (dunno if it's free or only part of
ESXi/Enterprise stuff), it's basically a tool that is capable of
migrating a physical machine to a vm on vmware, but vmware in turn is
capable of saving the machine in a standard format that Vbox can also
use.

It could also be that Vbox has a similar tool and that I just haven't
come across it yet....

HTH,
Eliyahu - אליהו
>
>
> --
> Nadav Har'El                        |     Thursday, Dec 6 2012, 23 Kislev 5773
> nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
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