Black screen of death.

[hyphenpipe]

I made an image of my system drive used Clonezilla's front end for DD in Parted Magic.

I then converted this image to a VDI using the command "VBoxManage convertfromraw -format VDI [filename].img [filename].vdi" and it appeared to be successful.

However when I mount this VDI and attempt to do a repair install with my Windows XP disc, it appears to begin the process of deleting drivers and such as normal, but when I reboot to continue the repair I am only met with the black screen of death.

If I attach this VDI image to another guest, it does recognize the drive and I can see and access all of the files it contains.

Any thoughts on this?

[hyphenpipe]

Upon further investigation, the drive does not show up in disk management of the other guest host but I can access it through Windows Explorer and see all copy/delete as normal.

Any thoughts?

[MarkCranness]

AFAIK, and when I tried it, Clonezilla (as included in Parted Magic anyway) does not copy the MBR and the first track to the image file, so if you use convertfromraw, the result can't boot and has no partitions. If Clonezilla is told to copy the MBR (which is the Beginner/default setting, IIRC), it puts the MBR into a separate file, rather than at the start of the img file. Look around in the folder you told Clonezilla to make the img in, and you may see the MBR file.

You have two choices:

• What I did (still using the Parted Magic Live CD) was use the command line dd program, which does copy the MBR as part of the image. Something like:

  Code: Select all

  Mount Devices the drive you want the img on, and unmount the drive you want to copy
  $_ command line:
  dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb1/raw.img bs=64K
  VBoxManage convertfromraw ...

  ddrescue would be better if you can find it, because it handles bad sectors better.
  
  Be careful with the syntax, because one small mistake and you can wipe your drive!
  if=/dev/hda1 would copy partition 1 on drive a, if=/dev/hda would copy the entire drive.
  of=/dev/hdb1/raw.img copies to a file, of=/dev/hdb overwrites the drive!
  
  OR
• Create a new, empty VDI file the same size or slightly larger than the disk you have imaged.
  Use Clonezilla running inside the VM to copy the image file you do have to the new VDI.
  (You'll need the image file copied inside a VDI file or else create a raw vmdk - section 9.10 of the manual (or an external USB drive?) so that Clonezilla running in the VM can see it.)

Look at section 9.14 of the user manual and this link: Virtual Machine Configuration
DMIDecode for Windows

[hyphenpipe]

Is there a reason you chose a byte size of 64K rather than something larger?

[MarkCranness]

Yes, bigger is better. The example I copied just then used bs=64K (which is better than the default value of 512!)
I think I used bs=64K when I did mine, and then thought to use bs=1M but the copy was already underway, so I just waited.

Edit: Apparently bs=1MB is 1,000,000 and bs=1M is 1,048,576 ... strange.
http://linux.die.net/man/1/dd

[hyphenpipe]

Thanks Mark. Working on it now, I'll post my results just for completeness of the thread when I am done.