virtualbox.org

Ok, don't be mean just because I have a dumb question. Once upon a time, I had an XP image on a laptop. In that I am a Linux guy, I cut it down, removed everything that I could, and converted it first to a VMWare image, then to Virtualbox. Since it was Windows, of course, I never had an XP disk, just the image on the drive.

Now, just for giggles (and because I have more disk space than I need), I got this dumb idea. If I can go one way, from a disk image to a virtual machine, why can't I go from a virtual machine to a disk image? Don't ask me why I need to do this, because I don't; I just want to see if it is possible. Maybe I have too much time on my hands.

Now, I have looked, and I don't see that anyone has documented this, but I could be blind. It's been a long day. Any insight, I would appreciate it. Any flames, I respond in kind.

There is nothing magical about migrating from physical --> virtual (also known as P2V). All you are doing is imaging a disk and moving that image to another PC. Maybe one of the PCs is virtual, maybe not, it makes no difference, the techniques are the same. Maybe only the image file format is different: obviously you use whichever image format is most convenient on the target PC. P2V, P2P, V2V, V2P - it's all the same thing, same techniques, same issues.

To go from virtual to physical you run an imaging tool, for example dd or Acronis, inside the VM guest, writing the resulting image to any medium that can be accessed outside the VM, for example shared folder or USB drive. You then take the image to a new PC, boot up your favourite rescue CD capable of supporting your imaging tool, attach your USB drive, and "restore" the image onto the physical PC drive.