virtualbox.org

Hey there,

First post on this forum, and complete newb to virtual machines. Please have some patience with me if I am not providing all the relevant info.

I have a (hopefully) quick question about the possibilities of VM's. Here's the situation - my parents needed windows re-installed as theirs was 5 years old and ran like crap. I agreed to do it for them, in what I would now call the stupidest decision I've made in a while. I didn't want them to lose anything important so I created an image of the entire hard disk using Active@DiskImage before I did anything. Then I made sure I had all of the available discs needed to re-install windows. I proceeded to wipe the hard drives and install a bit more RAM and a new video card. Problem is, I had the wrong Windows XP disc, and now I can't re-install windows. To get some functionality for the time being, I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on my machine.

What would be most convenient for me and my folks would be if I could somehow use the disk image I have, and restore it as a guest OS inside of my current Ubuntu Host. A less convenient option would be to use Active@DiskImage, either from Ubuntu via Wine or from a Live CD version of Active@DiskImage, and restore the image to a separate hard drive as a dual boot system. If I do it as a dual boot system, can that be converted to a virtual machine?

Like I said, I am new to the whole concept of the virtual machine. Is it possible to get from this disk image to a guest windows working as it was prior to my wiping the hard drives?

Thanks in advance,
Andrew

Instead of trying to get a dual boot working, which is a tricky operation when you have to deal with a single OS and restore an image of another next to it. What you can do is restore the image inside a virtual machine. Then when it's done restoring, you boot the VM to it's OS but you MUST boot it to safe mode. That way, it will not load the drivers made for the hardware it used to be on, but generic ones. This will allow you to let it install the drivers for the new environment. You might want to remove the old hardware as well from the device manager first before attempting to boot to normal mode. So boot to safe mode, remove hardware and reboot to safe mode to make sure everything starts fine there. Then reboot to normal mode and pray it works.

Now if all of this fails, you can always try to get your parents to work with Ubuntu instead .