OT: creating disk image from existing disk for VirtualBox

[Daniel Shahaf]

Nadav Har'El wrote on Thu, Dec 06, 2012 at 22:47:17 +0200:
> 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.

It's a good idea to have the filesystem unmounted while dd is running, too.
(Yes, some people on this thread already know this -- but mentioning it
for the archives.)

> If you don't specify bs=, might as well use cp instead of dd, by the
> way.