Is it possible to copy a laptop to a VM?

[TerryM]

I have a rather flaky laptop that I would like to copy into a VM and run. At one point, I used VMWare's Converter stand-alone client to do something similar in the past ... but I've converted almost exclusively to using VirtualBox. Is there any way to do this with VirtualBox? I tried searching the manuals and forum and checked all of the FAQs to no avail - so, if this is a simple answer, I apologize in advance.

The flaky laptop is running XPSP3, and my host machine would either be Ubuntu or Vista.

THANKS IN ADVANCE!
Terry

[vbox4me2]

Read the FAQ and its links for methods, but the vmware convertor is a good one too.

[alukin]

I found nothing in FAQ about copying between VM and real machine. Could you please give a link?

I think that Clonezilla CD may help. See http://clonezilla.org

[TerryM]

As I indicated in my original post, I read the FAQ, scanned through the documentation, and searched the forums prior to posting. I wasn't able to find anything that directly addressed my question. I *am* fairly new to virtualization in general so it's quite possible that I missed something that does explain the process but from a point of view that doesn't correspond to my expectations.

For example, I read the information about importing an "OVF appliance" and scanned the documentation from VMWare on the OVF format - and this looks like it might help. However, I wasn't able to find a way to make an OVF from an existing laptop using Virtual Box. There is no plain language in the documentation that says: If you would like to make a virtual duplicate of an existing physical machine using VirtualBox you should explore creating an OVF file. So, I might be crawling up the wrong tree all together in thinking about creating an OVF and using the import command.

I had also considered the possibility of making a disk image of the hard drive (using something like clonezilla) and following the sparse instruction in this FAQ entry: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows. However, I'm unsure as to how I might make changes to the disk image (especially the windows registry) without actually booting from the hard disk image ... which most certainly should fail because the virtual hardware would be different from the laptop hardware. It seems to me that this would be like changing the motherboard, processor, video architecture (AGP to PCI), etc... in the laptop and expecting it to still boot afterward.

I'm hoping for clarification ... no need to write me a book on this topic, just point me in the general direction of the correct way to do this. THANKS!

Terry

[vbox4me2]

Read the Forum FAQ and the QuickClick FAQ, its all in there.

[TerryM]

Thanks!!

[TerryM]

So, I'm guessing that the references to the FAQ above are to ferret out the link to this 105-post thread which obliquely answers the question (the summary of which is pretty much: YMMV).

Trying to convert existing physical XP to a VM on a new host
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15834

Despite the first post in the thread not seeming to address the base issue of simply copying a physical XP machine to a Virtual host, the thread actually contains a lot of valuable information; but, given the thread's exploratory nature and belief that the problems encountered were often unique to the three-OS boot system on the physical machine in question, it's not entirely clear what the "base" instructions for attempting this might be. It's also not entirely clear - in fact - that if Windows is involved in the physical machine there can be any near-guarantee of success in a single procedure at all.

I guess I'll walk down the road of trying to assemble such a procedure and see what happens.
Terry

[vbox4me2]

It basicly comes down to 3 ways.
1. cloneZilla and GParted.
2. vmware converter.
3. follow that p2v thread.
None of which is easy if 1 and 2 don't work.