Cloning existing machines

[MarkKnecht]

Hello - First post here. I hope I've done enough searching and not finding my answer to warrant asking a question, but maybe not. I hope you'll all be kind.

QUESTION: What's the appropriate way to clone an existing drive to run inside of virtualbox? Is there a thread somewhere that explains this?

BACKGROUND:

I've been playing a bit with virtualbox to get used to it. I'm a stock trader currently running a Windows trading platform (TradeStation) inside of VMWare on Gentoo Linux. I'd like to move this to Open Source one of these days but in the short term I'll leave that there because it's working.

On the other hand I have two Windows platforms that I'd love to move to virtualbox immediately if I can. One is an old WinME box - very slow with a small hard drive, and the other is a Windows Vista laptop. I would like to dump the WinME hardware in the trash and just hang onto the disk image and run it as it is. On the other hand the Windows Vista laptop is mostly about capturing the Vista license in case the laptop dies. It's showing end-of-life signs and I don't know if I want to buy another laptop. Unfortunately this Vista license won't install on any PC as it's tied to something in the HP machine - BIOS or hardware - so if the hardware dies the license is pretty much gone I think.

Anyway, sorry for the long explanation. On Gentoo I have no disk space issues and I'd like to extract appropriate copies of the two Windows machine's hard drives for the purpose of running them. Both machines boot the Gentoo install drive so I can get control of the machine and probably make copies of the drives across my network if I can find the right commands and the right format to be useful when I try to use them in virtualbox, but so far I haven't found those instructions.

Thanks in advance for any pointers and help provided to a virtualbox newbie.

Cheers!

[wolli-berlin]

After the Start with VB, I created 3 guests on my system and since I created the guests in the same manner I decided to create a "duplicator guest".
1. I created a "basic" running system with WINDOWS XP
2. I added the following software:
- acronis true image
- tune up utilities
- a photo editing program like PHOTO IMPACT (to edit the desktop backgrounds to easily identify momentary running guests)
3. This all has to be done only one time
4. Then finish the Guest and edit the "properties" in the following way:
- use the duplicator guest as master IDE / SATA drive
- create additional drives with the "virtual media manager"
- add a second drive (secondary master). It has to be "added" in the IDE/SATA Controller properties.
5. Start the guest again
- create a "clone drive" with "acronis TRUE IMAGE HOME" in the "secondary master drive"
6. Before the next start "unselect" the master drive "duplicator guest" and set the recently cloned device as "primary master" drive.
Thats all.
Setup this cloned drive now to Your needs.

[MarkKnecht]

Wolli,
Thanks very much for the response.

I'm not sure I'm following your guide very well. Are you assuming that the drive that's getting cloned is on the system where you have VB? Or can the Acronis software clone across the network? And if so what is the remote machine running at the time? The host OS? Some form or Linux?

In my case the drive I need to clone is in another machine completely. Possibly I can remove the drive from the old system and place it in something like an external USB drive case but there's no way to hook the drive up in my new host machine as the new machine is SATA and the old machine IDE.

I'll go online and read more about the Acronis software.

Thanks,
Mark

[Etepetete]

Read this first. As I understand it you want to clone physical drives to run under VBox. Also search the forum for P2V.