virtualbox.org

Hi,
I've been successfully running Windows XP from another hard drive in my machine using VirtualBox.
Anyway, a friend of mine wants to use his install of Windows XP in his new computer (which doesn't work with XP).
It's a laptop and he has one single hard drive (1 TB).
I formatted it, installed Fedora 26 (one of the linux distros I'm familiar with)
and I cloned the old 80 GB PATA Disk to unallocated space of the new hard drive using EASEUS Partition Master.
So, now I have:

/dev/sda1 EFI Linux boot
/dev/sda2 Ext4 boot
/dev/sda3 LVM2
/dev/sda4 NTFS Windows XP (Clone)
/dev/sda5 Ext4 Data

I logged as root and I used the following command to make a vmdk to use in VirtualBox: VirtualBox made two vmdk files itself, called "WinXP.vmdk" and "WinXP-pt.vmdk".
I can open and import as IDE disk the very first one (probably the second one it's just a file containing metadata that specify which partition to use).
Anyway, once I try to boot in VirtualBox, it says that there isn't any bootable partition.
Googling, I found out that it may be related to MBR, so I tried with: and with no luck. (It does create the two vmdk files, but it doesn't start).

So... what now? It's not mandatory to boot Windows XP as rawdisk, I can convert it to a virtual machine file and my friend wouldn't mind (I think...).
Any suggestions?

Thank you in advance.

Why?

Why does the XP image need to be in a host partition? Didn't you just say that the XP image can't run natively on this host? If it can't run physically then why would you install it on a physical partition?

I suggest trying the more obvious route: image the disk to a VDI, use the VDI in a normal VM.

Why are you running all of this as root? There is no real need to use root and permissions will be complicated.

@mpack

Because I didn't install it, I just cloned the old hard drive to a partition (I mean, the whole hard drive, including Windows). Any suggestion about how to convert such partition to a VDI file in Fedora?

@Perryg

It was just a test and I didn't want VBox to complain about permission to use the vmdk to access the partition as rawdisk. (I don't use root account daily of course).

FranceBB wrote:Any suggestion about how to convert such partition to a VDI file in Fedora?

You could try the Disk2VHD from former SysInternals, now Microsoft. I am not sure how well it will behave under Wine. You could then convert the VHD to VDI just because the former is really fragile.

You should also search the forums for the previous discussions of this subject. The process is called a "physical to virtual migration", or P2V for short. So Google for "P2V site:forums.virtualbox.org".