How to migrate from real SL partition to vdi SL

[petert]

Environment: Host MacPro 4,1; Lion 10.7.4;
Vbox 4.1.20 with Guest Snow Leopard 10.6.8 64-bit

What I want to do:
(0) In Lion mount the real HD partition in which I have Snow Leopard 10.6.8.
I can do this using Disk Utility
(1) Launch VBox and start the virtual Snow Leopard.
This I can also do
(2) Use Migration Assistant in the VM Snow Leopard to bring stuff over from the real HD Snow Leopard.
I don't know how to do this.

Yes I have read the Manual including chapters 5 and chapter 9.
Probably don't fully understand but am nervous about raw disk reads.

I have tried to add the real HD to the VM SATA controller with the idea
of using Migration Assistant but can't seem to so.

So please advise what I need to do next.

TIA and respect.....

[mpack]

Raw disk reads (e.g. using a disk imager) are perfectly safe. It's raw disk writes that are potentially catastrophic, especially if the writes are to a disk that's already mounted in the host - I don't know if OS X allows that to happen.

Anyway, you have the wrong procedure. The safest procedure is to use a disk imaging tool to image your entire hard disk (make sure not to image just one partition) to a raw file (not to be confused with raw disk access). You then use "VBoxManage convertfromraw" to convert the raw file to a VDI. The result is a VDI image of a real disk. Whether you can get the VDI image to boot as a VM is a different matter.

[petert]

Thanks for your response and advice which I followed.
(0) Using Disk Utility made .dmg of entire real SL 10.6.8 partition.
(1) Used command line VBoxManage convertfromraw to make .vdi
(2) Attached to existing VM SL.
(3) Was able to launch Migration Assisrant and do a test migration of selected pieces.

So thank you for your contrinbution to my education.

One futher test I made was to create a new VM and attached the above .vdi as the only volume.
It failed to fully boot with the message "Still waiting for boot device".
This was after a couple of messages about "unloading...."
I know you said to make a .dmg of the entire HD but it's a 1TB drive so impractical.

I Googled and found a few posts but none really seemed relevant to me.
Because as an experiment I did a restore to a real newly created partition from the .dmg and it booted just fine.

So why would it not boot in the VM?

TIA for your forthcoming explanation.

respect....

Peter

[mpack]

So why would it not boot in the VM?

I can't be sure without being present to run diagnostics, but a partition image is useless on its own, if that's what you did.

[petert]

Attached are the last few lines of the console log.

Console log page 2 last few lines

Console.png (7.29 KiB) Viewed 1619 times

What do these mean?
The rest of the Console log looks quite normal to me?

[ChipMcK]

1. You have an existing running SL vm
2. You created a .dmg of an existing physical partition
3. You want to 'restore' that .dmg to a virtual disk attached to the same SL vm
Do I understand correctly?

[petert]

Thanks for your reply. Let me clarify.
I have an existing SL VM. it works fine and was made from the installer.
I wanted to import stuff from my real SL using Migration Assistant.
Made a .dmg of the real SL using Disk Utility.
Converted it to .vdi using VBoxManage convertraw
Powered up the SL VM and attached the above .vdi.
All worked as desired.

Being curious I then made a new VM and attached the above .vdi.
The idea was to boot from it. It begins to do that, i.e. finds the efi etc
and get a long way before hanging with those console messages.

As a further experiment I took the original .dmg and restored it to a
new empty real partition and it booted just fine.

So if it booted fine in the real world and it partially boots in the VM
world my question is why didn't it complete in the VM.

Hence the posting of the last part of the console.
I could post the entire console if it would clarify things.
But it looks perfectly normal to me.