New for Virtualbox, mothball Win7 and run it under Virtual Box.

[Lisa Miller]

Hello,

I am new to Virtual Box. Please forgive me for the questions I might have asked a thousand times.

What I like to do:
* Win 7 per 64, mothball it in a suitable backup format, (as .img .iso or what make sence?)
* Export the mothballed backup format (maybe .img or .iso) of Win 7 pro 64 in a format suitable for Virtual Box. (.ova or what make sence)

What I found:
* with "clone vdi" it should be able to export Win 7 64 as .vdi. But at least I can't do this from a running system. Possibly you can't export yourself with "clone vdi" and have to boot elsewhere to do it. Is this so ?

How do I proceed best ?

[scottgus1]

Do you already have a running Windows 7 VM in your Virtualbox?

Or do you want to bring a real Windows 7 computer into Virtualbox?

[Lisa Miller]

Do you already have a running Windows 7 VM in your Virtualbox?
Or do you want to bring a real Windows 7 computer into Virtualbox?

Yes, I like to bring a real Windows 7 pro 64 to into Virtualbox.

As alternate way I have found "disk to vhd", which looks like can create .vhd and .vhdx files from running physical Windows hard disk. It can be its possible to change the .vhd after creating by Aqemu to a .vdi file for VirtualBox.

A I guess they are a way which is a little bit more directly.

[scottgus1]

Ok, you are trying a P2V, for Physical-to-Virtual. You can learn a lot about this process by web-searching:

Windows 7 P2V site:forums.virtualbox.org

Disk2VHD is the usual tool that Virtualbox users use to P2V a Windows PC. One thing I have heard is to be sure to copy all of the partitions in Disk2VHD. Windows will not boot if you only copy the C:\ partition.

Once you have the VHD, use Mpack's CloneVDI to make a .VDI copy. VHD has a design flaw that will kill the disk file if a hard drive error happens at the right time. VDI handles this problem better.