Problems Migrating Windows 7

[ohnoplus]

Hello All,
I am following these instructions to try to migrate my Windows 7 operating system to a virtual box that I will run on a linux host on the original computer.
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows
I have two problems that seem to alternate randomly. Currently, when I get to the step where I try to do a Windows 7 system restore and load in the Windows boot medium CD I get a blue screen of death with the name BAD_SYSTEM_CONFIG_INFO.
In an earlier attempt, I got past this point and to the part where I inserted the first recovery disk at which point I got a pop-up that said the recovery had failed.

Other notes:
In the step where I run MergeIDE on the original windows machine, the file seems to run, but there are no messages and the whole run takes less than two seconds. Maybe nothing is happening?

Any suggestions on how I might procede?

[mpack]

1. All MergeIDE does is add a few registry values, so it should be nearly instant.

2. MergeIDE is only required by XP guests AFAIK.

3. A common problem is when the VM uses SATA. Try IDE for the virtual hds.

[ohnoplus]

Thanks mpack. I follow you on points 1 and 2. I moved the hard disk to the ide controler and I am getting the same blue screen message. Any other ideas?

edit: Just gave the drive a 1024mb of memory instead of 512mb.
Now it advances untill I get to the place where I am supposed to insert recovery disk one. At this point it tells me to insert the Applications and Drivers recovery disk 1. When I insert Recovery Medium 1 (which is what I think it is talking about I get first an error that this is not the correct disk. Tried a second time and got a "Recovery failed" message. Any more advice?

One more bit of information. If I try to boot without a cd I get a black screen with
FATAL: INT18 BOOT FAILURE

[mpack]

What tool did you use to image the original drive? And did you image the whole drive with all partitions?

[ohnoplus]

Drive imaging was done as per the following command
sudo cat /dev/sdb1 | VBoxManage convertfromraw stdin LinWin2.vdi 1572864000
Where the drive size was determined by fdisk.
And sdb1 is the location of the drive according to ubuntu's disk utility.

[mpack]

And sdb1 is the location of the drive according to ubuntu's disk utility.

Not according to my understanding it isn't, though I freely admit that I'm not a Linux expert.

According to my understanding, "sdb1" refers to the first partition on the second SCSI drive (was this a USB drive?). "sdb" is what you'd use to refer to the entire drive, which is what you needed to image.

I think part of the problem is that you were following that ancient howto. In this day and age you'd use Disk2VHD to image a Win7 system. In fact it might be a good idea for you to Google "P2V site:forums.virtualbox.org".

[ohnoplus]

You were right about sdb1 not being the right drive. I switched to calling sdb instead and everything just worked. Didn't even have to use recovery disks. Thanks for the advice.

[mpack]

An additional tip I'd give is to to now clone the VDI using CloneVDI (you'll need Wine to run this on Linux hosts). Make sure you have the "Compact" and "Keep UUID" options ticked. The clone VDI should be a one-for-one replacement of your VDI (you can just replace one with the other by renaming), but it should occupy substantially less host disk space.