VMWare to Virtualbox conversion

[railmeat]

Hello, I am looking for information about converting VMs from VMWare to VirtualBox. I have serveral VMs on VMWare Workstation 8 on a Windows 7 host; I have just purchased a laptop running Ubuntu 12.10 and installed VirutalBox 4.2.6. I would like to move all my VMs from the Windows host to the Linux host, which means converting from VMWare to VirtualBox. I have searched and reviewed the help, but cannot find explicit instrucions about how to do that.

I have tried just copying the VMWare VMs to the Linux box and opening them in VirtualBox. VB does not complain about the vmdk file format, but WinXP does not boot, reporting that it cannot find the OS.

Any advice, reference to help or HowTo's would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[mpack]

The question has been asked in various ways, many times before. For example here. You can use Google to find more if you include the search term "site:forums.virtualbox.org".

[Rootman]

I did a whole bunch of conversions and all but one went without a hitch, the one that failed was screwed up anyway and was just a copy of another one so I just copied the other completed conversion to the other host.

Check this out: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=52705&p=241380#p241380

[railmeat]

Rootman, I am glad it worked for you. It did not work for me no matter what I tried. I did not try verifying the IO APIC or PAE/NX. Maybe it would have worked if I did that.

In any case I just spent my Saturday recreating the five key Windows installs I need in VirtualBox. They work fine, but it was a tedious waste of time.

I would think this kind of procedure is something the VirtualBox developers would test and document. It would be very helpful to have a recipie in the VM help.