Re: OT: creating disk image from existing disk for VirtualBox

[David Suna]

On 12/7/2012 7:40 PM, vordoo wrote: On 2012-12-07 01:07, Doron Shikmoni wrote: On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 9:26 PM, David Suna <da...@davidsconsultants.com> wrote: This is somewhat off topic as it does not directly address Linux but it does have some relevance to free software. 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? https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows Yep, that's the official way, you can also use the vmware migration tool. Usually cloning -dd/ghosting, won't work without running a migration tool on the OS beforehand. The 'whole thing' is called P2V, so you can google if you get in trouble;-) If you have only got the original HD, it's best to attach it to a similar as possible motherboard to the original it was installed on, and boot directly into safe mode(F8) -in order to run the migration tool. I would have an extra copy of the HD before I start the game. Good Luck! Thanks for everyone's suggestions.  As noted the official way requires you to be able to boot into the old system to run a migration tool which was not an option for me. Special thanks to Geoffrey Mendelson for pointing me in the direction of Acronis (www.acronis.com).  They have a product (not free) that will backup an existing hard disk and restore it to dissimilar hardware and do all of the fixing up under the covers.  I was able to use that to backup the disk and restore it as a virtual machine image. I know this is still off topic but in case someone else runs into this in the future I figured it wouldn't hurt to have the solution in the archives. -- David Suna da...@davidsconsultants.com

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