Moving from XP to Ubuntu; overwhelmed !!!

[smallhagrid]

Hi Folks.
I have decided to get off the windows rollercoaster by moving to an Ubuntu variant, but this is problematic as I still need some of my windows programs daily and will for some time.
Tried making them run correctly in Wine, but some of them simply do strange things instead of working correctly, so:

It is time to make the journey into virtualization.

I tried several methods of doing the P2V thing from a very recent, minimal XP-SP3 installation on my notebook and no matter what I tried I could not get the files I made to go into, run, open or anything in Virtualbox.
When any attempt seemed to almost open/run it quit with an error instead.
Searching in any number of help forums produced alot of references, but none specifically geared towards importing/running a guest OS from a previously set-up physical PC.
The OS-specific forum folks all pointed me here...so here I am.

Is there any simplistic, step-by-step guide to doing this and to getting together the specific tools needed for it ??
If so (or not ?), would someone please show me what/how to do this in an easy to understand manner ??

The closest I've seen thus far is the post on this forum at:

Code: Select all

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=22656

And it is from 2009 - as well as being fairly complex besides.
(Sorry - I am not yet allowed to post full URLs...)

Thanks for any help.

[Zium]

You could try VMWare converter, then you'll create a new VM in virtualbox and attach the .vmdk disk.
you may need to enable IO/APIC in VM settings to be able to start the VM.

[smallhagrid]

Thanks, but:

You could try VMWare converter, then you'll create a new VM in virtualbox and attach the .vmdk disk.
you may need to enable IO/APIC in VM settings to be able to start the VM.

That seems like alot less info than I really need !!!

I tried that several times - made VMDK files, VDI(?) files - nothing - and I mean NOTHING would open or run in Virtualbox, it was like those files did not even exist at all...this is why I've asked here for a step-by-step way to get this right.
I spent alot of time trying it already, with zero success.

[Zium]

How did you try to make VMDK ?

I have no guide but i'm sure google has many, that's why i told the most important.