Copy HDD partition to VDI file

[Passiday]

Hello,

So I have this laptop with Win XP installed on it, and I'd like to install Linux on this hardware. No dual boot, but scrap the Win boot forever. Well, not really forever immediately. I'd like to first move the HDD partition where the Win XP is to a VDI file, so that I could connect it to a VirtualBox (that would be installed in Linux) VM, where I could visit my old friend time to time, in order to gradually move files and software configs from one platform to the other.

I could not find any site where such procedure would be described. Perhaps that's not trivial, I can imagine. Perhaps the host OS should be booted so that the copyable partition is totally isolated, in order not to mess up the copy. Perhaps that would be two-step process: 1st make an ISO file from the existing HDD, then make a VDI file from that ISO file. But I am talking just theoretically here, I have no idea how to make ISO (or whatever) file from a physical HDD, and then how to make VID from it. But I hope it is possible.

Passiday

[mpack]

http://www.google.com/search?q=migrate+ ... .org&meta=

[Passiday]

Thanks,

The approach here http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=22656 was successful.

However, the now migrated Win guest is very picky. It freezes when I try to install the Guest Additions, it hangs when I try to remove some software, it hangs up at some other random situations.

Tough luck, I'll see if there is anything on this account in the web, however it's really hard to describe such behaviour in order to find to-the-point advice.

Maybe there is some rule-of-the-thumb advice someone can throw at me?

Passiday

[vbox4me2]

Look into the device manager and delete whatever hardware it used to have from the real world.

[Etepetete]

It sounds to me that an important step was left out, i.e. configuring the BIOS DMI information. It might have paid off to search for a few more threads, regarding HDD to VDI. There are plenty of them in this forum. One way which is (for me) relatively easy, is to make a raw copy of the partition using the linux dd utility and then convert it to a VDI using CloneVDI. And of course, I run a little script to configure the BIOS DMI data before first boot. I've done it and it works.

[Passiday]

Well, after some fight it's now done.

The first error was connected with intelppm.sys causing blue screen shortly upon windows showed the login screen. It required to do some registry manipulations that could be done while in safe mode, so it was easy to fix it.

Some other issues were connected with poor windows remembering the good old days when it used to have ATI graphics card, modem, etc. Removing the dead remnants of those hardware device references perhaps did some good.

The main culprit however seems to be Kaspersky Anti Virus. For some reason, that animal does not like to live in the zoo, it needs real jungle. I uninstalled it and suddenly host of other seemingly totally unrelated problems were gone. Kind of sucks tho, because I have purchased the KAV licence and can not use it any more. At least I couldn't find any suggestions online how to make KAV run under virtualized Windows XP properly (the crashing thing is known in the community).

Seems like the mission is complete, thank you.

[constant]

.
Perhaps you already know, but I've found a good(and free) security solution to be AVG in conjunction with Malwarebytes.

[Passiday]

Well, mission *kind of* accomplished...

Now the poor captured windows after about 5 minutes of solid stable uptime starts popping up nasty errors "Application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000142)" at any attempt to run any program. Google search for this error provides references to several different seemingly unrelated cases, none of them really helpful in my case.

At the moment I have not found a good stable way to provoke this behaviour.

Maybe someone has stumbled upon something similar?