Help with encrypted partition in source machine

[caspertone2003]

Hi All,
After several hours looking for the forums and documentation, I give up to try to find the answer by myself.
Let me start by saying that I am practically new to virtualization, and that I am *not* the "one" installing/using VB.
I have a Win-XP in partition 1 of HD0 in my pc, that is set-up with truecrypt pre-boot encryption. There are other partitions in HD0 and other HDS with also partitions, but no other boot loaders.

I need to execute a VM with my XP under the borrowed PC of a friend with VB installed, this PC has resources (memory, procesor, disk) enough to run VB.

I created a VHD using disk2vhd (Sysinternals) and my friend loaded that into his VB. Black screen, no request for password to decrypt.

I am not sure if
a) VHD include MBR (partitions+boot loader) (buy certainly truecrypt bootloader is needed!) or not
b) if disk2vhd skips it while making vhd

Is there any "easy" way to
1.- make work the already vhd done with VB? (perhaps saving a copy of my pc mbr and gluing it to the VHD, or instructing VB to boot from a CD or alike where it coult take the needed boot loader and so on). If yes, how? (simple, expecific instructions pleas!)
2.- easily creating a "proper" image for my HD0 partition 1. If yes, how? (again, specific instructions please!).
Very Much Big Thanks in Advance!
CTone

[mpack]

I created a VHD using disk2vhd (Sysinternals) and my friend loaded that into his VB. Black screen, no request for password to decrypt.

The problem probably has nothing to do with encryption, this is most likely a P2V problem - perhaps the first of several. Did you prepare the original installation for P2V at all, e.g. by running MergeIDE?

In the meantime you can try enabling the "IO APIC" setting in the VM in question. That should get you past the black screen. But if you did no P2V preparation it will probably crash at the next hardware conflict. Let us know.

[caspertone2003]

First all, thank you for your interest and time. I am afraid I have make you lost your time.

I have seen this from a more naive perspective. My impression (perhaps the most natural user desire) was that plainly getting the vhd image and loading it into VB was the only needed. What other would expect a user? It was so easy to obtain the vhd ... why would the user have to take care of hal etc? I was simply expecting VB behaving as a middleware VM to HW where VB is installed and taking care of solving those issues. Or, that any tool doing P2V would be "retouching" the system to make it HW-independent ... For me this was a test to see if I could swith to a more powerful mobo without needing to reinstall. So the "brilliant" idea was to get an image of my current OS partition and run it as a VM in a powerful host.

Now ... following your answer and making some googling ... reach to the "How to migrate existing Windows installations to VirtualBox"
All this looks quite difficult for me. Perhaps p2v has not become vanilla stuff enough yet ... Do not misundertand me, I am not complaining about VB, I am simply stating that this seems quite much more complex than expected, and the probably, it is easier to install in a new mobo ...

Thanks again,
CTone

[BillG]

P2V is certainly not easy. Even the expensive, corporate versions occasionally fail if the physical machine has something set up which is unexpected.

disk2vhd is pretty straight-forward program which works if your setup is simple and you select the right options when you run it. It is certainly not a fail-proof solution.

[mpack]

Now ... following your answer and making some googling ... reach to the "How to migrate existing Windows installations to VirtualBox"
All this looks quite difficult for me.

If you've found that "How to migrate..." page then you have the basic information, and it's really not hard. Just run MergeIDE on the original PC prior to imaging, and disable the processor service. It's increasingly likely that you'll be migrating from a PC that had an IO APIC, in which case IO APIC should be enabled in the VM (you only need to mess with the VMs HAL if you want to remove the IO APIC reliance for some reason). Keep all the other hardware the same, as much as possible. Disk2VHD already took care of that in the case of the hard disk only, you should arrange to have a similar amount of RAM, similar networking etc. Bear in mind that Windows will insist on reactivation when it finds itself in a new environment: you wouldn't want to do that if this is just a test for a later migration to yet different hardware.

It also helps if the Windows installation being migrated is as plain and uncomplicated as possible. Disable unnecessary processes (including resident antivirus, windows search, etc). If you really need them then they can be re-enabled one at a time post migration.

[caspertone2003]

Thank you both for your time.
I will follow mpack advice and will try. But not inmediately as I have some trips ahead.
Will report back progress
CTone