Best P2V Windows XP Guest Solution?

[Ryan C]

I have been looking for something that can create a P2V file that can boot in a VB VM. I was surprised to find that as of at least of a year or two ago there seemed to be no good direct solutions to do this. I found a multi-step solution using VM software from brand X, but so far have not found a really nice and feature rich one step solution.

I want to be able to image an entire Windows XP drive with all settings and software and be able to boot it in VB. Ideally, when the image is created I would also like to have a way to exclude folders from the image. I have not seen anything that can do that while creating the P2V file, even though it seems a basic feature.

I have heard mixed things about Disk2vhd in terms of being able to do this job. I understand what it creates is not really P2V and a few comments I read from people who tried it said that it did not work successfully in a P2V XP to VB. Maybe someone here can tell me if it does indeed work for this or not and what the issues are. It cannot exclude folders, but it does create a full disk VHD ... which I assume is bootable. I understand that part works well, but what good is it if you can't boot the image successfully? Maybe there are driver issues when trying to mount it in a VB VM?

In any event, is there any good solution out there to do this? Thanks for any help!

[Perryg]

Disk2vhd works just fine for Windows metal to virtual. The issues are the drivers just like you would have if you moved the hard drive to a different PC and turned it on. You will have to fix these for it to work. Easiest way is to boot XP in safe mode and let it do its thing.

[mpack]

You might also want to read this XP migration tutorial :-

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows

It's quite old and somewhat Linux-host biased, but obviously the issues with XP remain the same. You can ignore the step by step instructions which advocate imaging with dd, as Disk2VHD cuts out the need for all that.

One thing: VHD is an awful format. I would recommend converting to VDI before you build a VM around it. The easiest way to do that is to clone the VHD using CloneVDI (see sticky at the top of this forum).

[Ryan C]

Interesting.

So you recommend making the P2V .vhd file with Disk2VHD and then converting it to a .vdi file with CloneVDI?

I notice that CloneVDI can also make the P2V directly to .vdi format, but it sounds like it isn't as good a tool for that as Dick2VHD so the two step process sounds preferable if you want to end up with a .vdi format.

The nice thing about .vhd seems that is appears to be a more universal format that can be read natively in Windows for example.

What advantages does the .vdi format have over .vhd?

[socratis]

Disk2VHD creates a virtual drive (vhd) from a physical system to a virtual one.
CloneVDI translates on virtual drive format (vhd) to another (vdi).
As far as I know CloneVDI can not do P2V directly.

[mpack]

As far as I know CloneVDI can not do P2V directly.

In fact it can, you need only give a Windows disk device name as the source. However as Ryan mentions, CloneVDI is not specialized for that purpose, so basically you have to take a moment longer to check the dialog contents (e.g. don't let it write to the disk it's copying!) before you click the Proceed button, and you shouldn't have any disk modifying apps running at the time.

More information about this usage can be found in the CloneVDI release notes.