virtualbox.org

How do I go about taking a physical Ubuntu Desktop 9.04 box to a virtual machine in VirtualBox?

It is possible. I once took a windows xp real machine and I cloned it as a vm.
I just booted on a live linux, and cloned the hdd with dd_rescue. (partition/s have to be unmounted first!)
Then with some VB command I don't remember I converted the raw hdd dump into a vdi.

It booted fine, just that at beginning it prompted a lot about new devices.

well I just did something similar with my Ubuntu box (gparted + partimage) and it booted just fine in VirtualBox, but the vbox network card isn't showing up in the virtualize machine. I tried both the default NIC (PC-NET something) and the Pro 1000 desktop NIC and nether works. Any ideas?

Remove /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
And reboot your guest.

Tried it and still no NIC. After I delete 70-persistent-net.rules and reboot, a new one is created. I viewed it and saw that the MAC address matches whats listed/defined in the vbox's Network settings and says eth0, but when I ifconfig there's no eth0 listed, just lo

any other ideas?

got eth0 to come up finally (I had it commented out in /etc/network/interfaces for some reason). but now I can't access the network or Internet (I got it set to NAT in Network settings)

SOLVED: I figured I mangled the OS' installation so I restored the original partimage disk image and then switched to bridge mode and it worked. P2V was eventually successfully