virtualbox.org

Taking 64 bit Windows 8.1 P2V into VirtualBox. I'm stuck right now at the Disk2VHD stage; all partitions except the C: converted OK but the C: partition converts to the point where the progress bar appears all the way complete, but the software hangs there for hours, never successfully terminating. Already tried going to VHD instead of VHDX, restarting, and fixing the HDD for errors; same result. So I'm searching for alternative disk-to-VDI creation tools. I'm aware of Paragon and BackupChain. Any recommendations? Thanks Everyone! ...Monty.

Are you sure the problem is Disk2VHD and not the backup media? E.g. media formatted with FAT32 will fail when the file grows > 4GB, which is very likely to happen as the C volume is being copied. I have used Disk2VHD lots of times and not had your problem.

By the same token I've not had a reason to find alternative "direct to virtual disk" solutions. I do use Macrium Reflect Free for making whole disk backups of physical PCs. However the ".mrimg" backup can't be used directly as virtual media. You'd have to boot the VM from a Macrium Reflect Rescue CD (the software has a function to create one on these), and then access the .mrimg file somehow - an ad-hoc virtual ISO is probably the most convenient way to do this - and restore the backup into the VM.

Thanks Mpack! Yes I have successfully used Disk2VHD on both Windows 10 and Windows XP and successfully created VMs from them. However I don't seem to be getting past this hang on Windows 8.1. I've tried it with VHD and VHDX. I've tried it with and without shadow copying box ticked. The progress bar goes all the way across, over a period of an hour or less, then just sits there for hours without anything further happening. I don't think it's the destination medium; that's a 1TB external USB drive, NTFS, that seems to be working OK otherwise.

So begins my quest for an alternative. When I wrote this original post, I was unaware of your own CloneVDI tool, which if I'm reading online posts correctly, has the capability of generating a VDI from the raw hard drive; am I understanding that correctly? If I could create a VDI from the raw HDD, using an application running either in Windows 8.1 or in a live Linux stick, that might be a more viable alternative here, if you know of any such tool. I could "gparted" first, to resize the Windows partition smaller, if a tool doesn't have built-in compaction.

I'm willing to try the Macrium route also, if you'd recommend that instead.

Yes, you can sometimes clone a physical hard drive to VDI directly using CloneVDI, however that was not the intended purpose, so it isn't the most user friendly tool for that function. Plus the current version can't recognize the contents of EFI partitions (which from your other thread I believe you have), so it can't do a "smart" copy in that scenario, plus I think there's a bug which prevents you from making this work.

I do think the Macrium route would be better.

Thanks; I'll try that. Do you know the difference between its .mrimg file and the .img image files I can create under Debian?

By the way I found out why Disk2VHD was hanging; at least I have a strong suspicion. When I tried to make a VDI using BackupChain, it didn't work. But this time it told me that my /sda5 which is the large partition in which Windows is installed, had bad sectors so it failed to create the image I needed. But at least it had the smarts to detect the errors and error-out. The tool that creates .img files went a step further, and just created the disk with zeros filling-in for the bad sectors. I don't know whether it will work, but again it's much more informative than Disk2VHD just hanging forever.

Windows appears to run fine on the legacy system, and when I run its disk check it cannot find any errors. It would be a good time for an SSD swapout, if I intended to stay on the metal.

MontyMan wrote:Thanks; I'll try that. Do you know the difference between its .mrimg file and the .img image files I can create under Debian?

Uh, it's the same as the difference between a .jpeg and a .mrimg, i.e. they serve completely different functions. .mrimg is the proprietary file format used by Macrium Reflect to store whatever it needs to store in there. An img file is not.

MontyMan wrote:By the way I found out why Disk2VHD was hanging; at least I have a strong suspicion.

A bad source or destination filesystem was my suspicion too. Disk2VHD is a small and simple tool, IMHO it can't be expected to have all the bells and whistles of a commercial app. But it's generally trustworthy, and if it fails then my money would be on an external cause.

Replacing bad sectors with zeros is exactly what I'd do: the data is gone anyway, so you're no worse off. Unfortunately it does mean that those sectors must belong to a file or to metadata, otherwise "smart imaging" wouldn't have bothered copying those sectors. It may be worth running chkdsk on the source: sometimes NTFS can remap bad sectors and repair minor damage.

I was unaware of Macrium. That looks like a very capable, slick system!

Thanks so much Mpack, and all those who have contributed to this excellent site! Since I already had the IMG file created, I decided to try going directly from IMG to VDI, then compressing, and so far it's working great! The IMG was the same size as the original HDD: 320 GB. I followed these instructions...

https://www.ostechnix.com/how-to-conver ... irtualbox/

...which leads to a VDI that's again the same size as the original HDD, but this time it's dynamic, which means it can be compacted, like so:

https://www.howtogeek.com/312883/how-to ... isk-space/

Although this article says it won't compact unless it was previously created smaller then grew and had some contents deleted, it works in this case as well. 70 GB for the entire disk, not just selected partitions, and brought it from the external drive into the main system VM directory structure. I took the default 2 GB of RAM allocation, increased the processors from 1 to 2, and tried a couple of different NIC simulators until one of them matched the VM. Guest additions are in, and Windows is working with comparable speed to native hardware!

I will keep Macrium in my tool belt for a future P2V though; probably would have saved a few hours' time.

All best,
..Monty.

Marking this "solved" since Mpack and I have each offered a path from "on the metal" Windows to a VDI. I believe that the difficulty Disk2VHD had (hanging) was due to bad sectors but I can't know that for sure.

I strongly suspect unless it's updated that Disk2VHD will become less of a viable alternative to accomplish P2V on these computers with 7 or more partitions. In my experience Disk2VHD produces one VHDX file for each enabled partition, and as has been mentioned here, some disk areas are not even visible to Windows.

Thank you
......MontyMan.