Offline migration

[wpeckham]

Greetings all. I hope this has NOT been asked before (I could not find it) but I have an interesting issue. I will describe the issue and pose the questions in order of (my) Urgency. Thank you in advance for any pointers, procedures, or comments.

A tale of two laptops:
LT1=Win7x32 with VirtualBox and a Win7x32 guest. I nearly always worked in the guest. Had a clone of the guest, and had exported a copy of the clone so it could be imported in an emergency.

LT2=Win7x64, no VB.

LT1 died. Power circuit failed and MB smoked. Pulled drive and placed it in one of those little USB adapters. It works. Slowly.

LT2: installed VB.

Question-1: is there any way to migrate my windows guest from the USB mounted hard drive and onto my native disk on LT2?
Question-2: if there is no good way and I must import the backup I exported a few months ago, am I likely to have to re-activate windows?
(I would really like to avoid having to go through the whole re-activate process again if it can be avoided. )

Question-3: Is there a "Best VB Practice" to minimize downtime and problems against this happening again.
(My company is enamored of MS and lowest bidders. It is WHEN it will happen again, not if. )

[mpack]

If the guest was created by VBox v4 or later (i.e. is there a .vbox file), then simply move the entire VM folder with contents to somewhere convenient on the new PC and use Machine|Add... to register the .vbox file there.