virtualbox.org

I've read through the forums and numerous pages elsewhere, and haven't come up with a workable answer. Here's what I'm trying to do:

I have a PXE boot server here, and am wanting to create a simple bootable volume containing DOS, mainly as a quick way to boot up various PC systems here for updating BIOS via the DOS prompt. The simplest way to get a DOS installation running was with VirtualBox, so I created a new VB, did the install, configured everything to my liking, and now I'm trying to convert this into something my PXE server will be able to use. I've tried using the command below, since it should have created a working .img file:

vboxmanage clonehd myDOS.vdi myDOS.img --format RAW

This did indeed create an .img file, but when I tried to mount this (OSFMount, Virtual CloneDrive, other tools) I'm not able to see any partitions or other data on the image, and my PXE server just spins its wheels when a client tries to boot to this image.

I've even tried to find a way to use a USB stick as a physical volume, and do a copy from within DOS, but that failed as well. The best I could do was format my USB stick as a 1.4Mb floppy, but the copy process kept hanging up.

What I'm trying to do certainly didn't seem hard when I started down this path, I'm hoping there is some workaround I haven't discovered yet that I can use under Windows.

Hmm. As far as I'm concerned your use of VBoxManage clonehd was correct, assuming that you did actually create a bootable DOS filesystem on that hard disk, and avoided snapshots. What does CloneVDI say about the vdi (or the .img for that matter)? You can also try using CloneVDI to create the raw image: if you use the sector viewer feature you'll find that it has a button to dump a bunch of sectors to a file. Of course if you dump the entire virtual disk image then you have a raw file. I hope you didn't make the disk too big.

I went through my steps again on this, and this time I did have a working image after doing the clonehd, as far as I know I didn't do anything differently than before, but now OSFMount did recognize the cloned drive as something it could work with.

Thanks for the info on the CloneVDI tool, it may come in handy in the future.