virtualbox.org

Sorry I didn't catch it sooner. I have been knee deep in Oracle stuff this last 10 days.
Back to being me now and helping the boys a little less with there studies. Thank goodness.
Oh and the 3rd button? Still grayed out. hee hee

Ok, so it looks like there are a couple more things I need to do before I set it aside. One is some useful equivalent of "Show header" for VMDKs, and the other thing that may be useful (judging from recent posts elsewhere) is an easy way to convert raw disk or partition images into VDIs.

The sector editor will probably never come to pass... Though a sector viewer would still have its uses...

mpack wrote:Ok, so it looks like there are a couple more things I need to do before I set it aside. One is some useful equivalent of "Show header" for VMDKs, and the other thing that may be useful (judging from recent posts elsewhere) is an easy way to convert raw disk or partition images into VDIs.

The sector editor will probably never come to pass... Though a sector viewer would still have its uses...

You know me. Anything new and exciting...... Well to a point.

Content Moved.

mpack wrote:In fact I never intended to support VMDK, but your mention of it a while back gave me an itch that I just couldn't scratch... it was an obvious missing feature, whether it was strictly necessary or not.

Have you looked at the the VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) ? I was wondering if that would simplify supporting VMDKs as an output.

Congrats on a great tool, by the way!

NeBlackCat wrote:

mpack wrote:In fact I never intended to support VMDK, but your mention of it a while back gave me an itch that I just couldn't scratch... it was an obvious missing feature, whether it was strictly necessary or not.

Have you looked at the the VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) ? I was wondering if that would simplify supporting VMDKs as an output.

Congrats on a great tool, by the way!

Why would you want VMWare image output for a tool primarily made for VirtualBox, and thus VDI output?

NeBlackCat wrote:Have you looked at the the VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) ? I was wondering if that would simplify supporting VMDKs as an output.

Actually, supporting VMDK for output would be simple anyway - far simpler than supporting it for input, where I have no control over the range of format variants people use. So a devkit isn't the issue, the issue is that I simply made a design decision that this tool will only create VDIs, partly because that is what I need, partly because I believe VDI is the most elegant format around (*), and partly because I want to encourage people to use VirtualBox, not ease their way to other products!

(*) Admittedly, VMDK is a well designed format too. VHD on the other hand has several really stupid design decisions - I truly hope that Win7 does not make VHD an undeserved defacto standard!

Hello,
I'm not running windows naturally, can I run the program into XP gest OS, which will have access to the files via shared folders?

F

VbRider wrote:I'm not running windows naturally, can I run the program into XP gest OS, which will have access to the files via shared folders?

Yes, CloneVDI will run happily in an XP guest. That is one of the advantages of not being a VBoxManage GUI: CloneVDI will work even if VirtualBox is not present. If you had a Windows host I would suggest using network shared folders for max speed (rather than using VBox Guest Additions shared folders), but in fact I don't know what performance you get from GA shared folders on a Linux host. You should do some checks yourself though, since virtual disk images are typically BIG files, so I/O performance is very important.

An alternative is of course to install the Wine package on the Linux host, then run CloneVDI on that (I'm told CloneVDI works fine under Wine).

VbRider wrote:Hello,
I'm not running windows naturally, can I run the program into XP gest OS, which will have access to the files via shared folders?

F

This tool will run on Wine, I've tested it myself with a few VDI files. See the sticky in Linux Hosts too. Don't be alarmed of the big red text, it's just something to warn users that it might not work 100% with other Wine versions and to avoid pointing the guilty finger to mpack if something does go wrong or not work. It's best to have a backup and run the tool on the backup so you won't screw things up if they happen. Should be done anyway, regular backups .

NEW VERSION RELEASED - v1.40 (see root message for download link).

Please note that I've released a new version of my CloneVDI tool (v1.40). This new version adds read support for RAW files, and a "Sector Viewer" feature which lets you inspect the content of the source virtual disk and dump a range of sectors to a file: maybe this last feature will be useless to everyone but me, or maybe not! The release notes have been updated to document the new features.

Ok, this means that I now support all of the virtual disk formats that VBox supports, so am I done?

Btw, I'm sorry to the guys who just downloaded v1.30 yesterday, it must be very irritating to find yourself out of date already, but what can I say? Hopefully the update frequency will begin to slow down from now on, since I'm running out of features I'm really keen to add, and I hate software that gets bloated by unnecessary features just to keep an update schedule going. On the other hand the CloneVDI download is still teeny by modern standards, still only about 70k zipped.

I wanted to tryout your tool to clone (create from raw) a raw image but the GUI only allows selection of .vdi files. Is this intentional? Should I just rename the image to.vdi for this to work?

Assuming you have the latest version of the tool (v1.40) then the source file "browse" button will definitely show you any .RAW files that exist in a folder, and allow you to select them. I could hardly have tested the feature without that capability!

Never change the extension. My tool will not recognize the file if it has the wrong extension.

If you still can't get it to work then please post a single picture (hopefully not too big) showing :-

1. The caption bar of CloneVDI (so I can confirm the version).
2. The open file dialog contents (reached from the source file "Browse" button) showing the contents of a folder, and not showing a .RAW file.
3. A windows explorer window open, showing same folder, showing that it contains a .RAW file.

My image has a .img extension. Rest assured, the file exists. I created a VDI using the "VBoxManage convertfromraw" command.
P.S. the validation result and Drive size are remnants from a test with the VDI I created. Wanted to see your program in action

Ah ok - the release notes are wrong. Rename the file to have a .RAW extension - the file will not be accepted without that. In the meantime I'll add ".img" to the list of recognized extensions, though I will not bother issuing a new release for this.