I was able to convert a real Windows XP installation into a virtual disk as follows:
0) insert external USB drive with Linux (/dev/sdb) 1) boot Ubuntu 9.04 2) dd if=/dev/sda of=/tmp/laptop.drive.img bs=16k 3) VBoxManage convertfromraw -format VDI laptop.drive.img laptop.drive.vdi 4) create a new VBox machine, attaching the laptope.drive.vdi and a Knoppix CD image /dev/sda is my laptop's internal drive, which contains Windows XP. If I boot from the Knoppix CD image, I can see the virtual drive as /dev/hda, I can mount /dev/hda1 (the Windows partition), and I can view the files. What I cannot do is boot the virtual Windows disk. I get this error: A disk read error occurred Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart I suspect this is because the original drive is a SATA drive, but VBox 2.1.4_OSE attaches all drives as IDE because it does not support SATA (the binary version does). But that's just a guess. My plan is to try the binary version of VirtualBox and use its SATA controller. Another thought would be to convert the raw image to a VMDK and use VMware server, which does have SATA support. In the end, will anything work or will Windows see a VM as completely foreign hardware and balk anyways? Thoughts? Regards, - Robert --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Central West End Linux Users Group (via Google Groups) Main page: http://www.cwelug.org To post: [email protected] To subscribe: [email protected] To unsubscribe: [email protected] More options: http://groups.google.com/group/cwelug -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
