virtualbox.org

Hello;
Does anybody know if it is possible to make a virtual machine under Win 7X64 that will run existing bootable USB HD with preexisting Win XP? I have a very important medical software, that was installed on a laptop, which died. I need to run it on two other different laptops (lenovo u400 and ASUS M50S) so this WinXP bootable drive needs to be used as external USB drive. Please help!

Google for "P2V Disk2VHD site:forums.virtualbox.org". If the HD is formatted with NTFS then it should be possible to use Disk2VHD to clone it to a VHD image. I would convert the VHD to VDI format before use though. The CloneVDI tool is probably your easiest tool to do the latter.

Thank you very much for respond. I am practically new to the virtualization, (but not to the HD managing and using various utilities). So maybe couple of stupid questions - just for the sake of understanding. Does VHD stand for "virtual hard drive" and VDI - for "virtual disk image" ? So if I convert a physical drive to virtual disk image with your utility, it will clone the USB drive into a virtual disk space on which hard drive - the SATA in laptop or to the same USB drive? If - to the internal SATA, I understand I need to do it on both laptops - am I getting it right? And if the size of data on the USB drive is apx. 40 Gb, do I need to consider 40GB on internal drives of both laptops? What about the drivers for laptop hardware? At this point it seems like making a double-boot with the cloned partition and installed drivers might be a better solution. The first p2v utility you mentioned, just writes a particular file to the physical drive, and the virtualization program recognizes it as a virtual drive. And by the way, is it still possible to use virtualbox, or do I need another program?
I apologize for all these questions, I just want to grasp the process in order to avoid fatal mistakes - the soft is really valuable and is used for work.
Thank you again very much.

VHD is the format used by Microsoft VM platforms - and Disk2VHD of course. VDI is the native format of VirtualBox, and preferred in VirtualBox. I think your guesses as to what the acronyms stand for are probably correct, but I've never needed to know for sure. It's important to know what these formats are, not so important to know how the name was chosen.

Disk2VHD will create the VHD clone whereever you tell it: the disk image is just an ordinary file, so the nature of the controller (SATA? USB? IDE?) attached to the host drive is not important. Disk2VHD does have the ability to write the image back to the source drive, but that's probably a bad idea for lots of reasons. It's a free download, and small, so why not download it and try it?

The VHD or VDI created will roughly approximate the used size of the source disk, not the source disk capacity. The variant of VHD or VDI used is called "dynamically allocated", meaning that host disk space is only allocated to the VM when the VM needs it. The VM will still "see" a 40GB drive, regardless of how much has been allocated on the host.

Personally I would do the P2V on one laptop, convert the VHD to VDI, get it all running as a VM... and then copy the finished VM folder to the second laptop, adding it to the VBox GUI there (Machine|Add... or just double click the .vbox file). P2Ving an XP image requires a modicum of work, there's no point in doing it twice.

All of the advice above assumes that you're using VirtualBox: I don't do support here for any non-VBox software.

As to fatal mistakes: as long as you don't modify the source disk, or you keep the original Disk2VHD file as a raw template, then there are no fatal mistakes to make. One tip - if your XP needs to be activated then postpone doing that for as long as possible. You don't want to activate XP as a VM and then decide you wanted to dual boot it instead.

mpak;
I really appreciate your thorough and patient answers. Thank you very, very much. Everything is clear, you really are a guru of this topic! Best regards to you.