Moving vista partition from physical to virtual

[yudi]

Hi

I am planning to move vista partition on my laptop to guest OS in Ubuntu on the same laptop. Right now I am dual booting. The other option is to create a VMDK rawdisk access to vista partition. But read somewhere that I will run into windows licensing issues. I find it to be slightly risky as this laptop is my main production system.

So I have decided to clone the vista partition and create an ISO and restore it to a virtual disk.
These are the links I am following:

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

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux ... #restorimg

Here are the steps I am going to follow

1 use the MergeIDE utility
2 Create an ISO using clonezilla
3 Create a virtual hard disk (vdi). I am planning to create the virtual HD on an external eSATA disk. I hope it will not cause any issues.
4 Enable IO APIC
5 Restore the image.

Please let me know if I am missing something. And also I would like to know what will happen with windows licensing in this process. My laptop came with vista, it's an OEM flavor.

Suggestions from any one who has done this before are welcome.

Thank you.
Yudi

[ChipMcK]

This is a Physical-to-Virtual tool creating an .VHD file (VirtualPC) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... 56415.aspx.
The .VHD may be then converted to a .VDI with the cloning tools of VBox

[yudi]

Thanks for the reply, It looks like a great tool. But at the bottom of the link it says:

" Note: Physical-to-virtual hard drive migration of a Windows installation is a valid function for customers with Software Assurance and full retail copies of Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Software Assurance provides users valuable benefits—please contact Microsoft Corporation for further information. Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 installed by Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) using OEM versions of these products may not be transferred to a virtual hard drive in accordance with Microsoft licensing terms."

As I mentioned above I am using an OEM version of Vista. Can I still use this tool?

Thnak you

Yudi

[ChipMcK]

The tool knows nothing about licensing, just does what is does.

[BillG]

Indeed. But if the original installation is an OEM version, the converted system may not activate or even boot, even though all of the files are converted correctly.

[yudi]

ChipMcK ,

Thankyou, Your suggestion worked like a charm. Couldn't believe how simple it was. When I first started playing with VMs, it was a pain to get most of them to work. It's simply amazing how easy it is now.

I have one problem though, CPU usage is at almost 100%. It will not come down. System has a C2D 1.8Gz CPU. Running Ubuntu as host and Vista 32bit as guest. Gave it 1.2Gb RAM and 28Mb VRam, sys has 3.2Gb physical RAM and a 64Mb nvidia GPU. Tried using single Virtual CPU and 2 Virtual CPUs. No use, I cannot seem to get the CPU usage down. Any ideas?

BillG ,

OEM works.

Yudi

[yudi]

It was ntfs-3g driver that was causing the cpu spike, Moved the VM disks to native file systems. I have vmdk on ext4 - using vmware player and vdi on jfs. Both work great.

I am using 2 processors in vbox but cpu usage does not go down below 40% where as in Vmware player, it goes down to less than 10% when idle. Am I missing something?

yudi

[Perryg]

Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 installed by Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) using OEM versions of these products may not be transferred to a virtual hard drive in accordance with Microsoft licensing terms."

Whether it works or not we can't help you to usurp the EULA from Microsoft. Plus it can still be that the OEM version will not play well since it more than likely was tuned for their system.

[yudi]

"Whether it works or not we can't help you to usurp the EULA from Microsoft. Plus it can still be that the OEM version will not play well since it more than likely was tuned for their system."

Amusing and thanks for the advice.

[mpack]

It's not "advice" matey - you just got a statement of forum policy from a moderator. If you ignore it then you risk being banned.