Create a virtual disk from an existing physical machine

philippe_48 · Post by **philippe_48** » 13. Sep 2008, 23:22

Is it possible to create a virtual disk (and thus a virtual machine) from an existing physical machine ?

Thanks you for all your suggestions

Post by **Sasquatch** » 14. Sep 2008, 01:01

Yes, that's possible. See the Tutorial: All about VDIs for some instructions.

Post by **fixedwheel** » 14. Sep 2008, 01:49

boot the real machine with a g4l CD and dump the real HDD to an external USB-HDD.

enable USB and boot the virtual machine with the g4l ISO image and restore from the USB-HDD to the attached empty VDI

this way i moved a Windoze XP from a real Pentium4 hardware to a virtual machine on a core2 (?) hardware, IIRC windoze had to install some other drivers but no big problem. YMMV

g4l: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile ... _id=119810

there is a tool from VMware to make a VMDK what i tried too, but it did not work for me ... it is a year ago, and things may have changed. AFAIK you can use VMDK with virtualbox.

Post by **TerryE** » 14. Sep 2008, 01:51

P, what are you trying to do? You leave too much unsaid in your Q. You can use ImDisk to loop mount a static VDI on an XP host. You can use VBoxManage or the SDK to configure your VM. So putting these together you can build VMs and launch them from a host based provisioning process.

You can also use a fixed Linux appliance, say a JeOS one plus hostSharing and fire it up and driver it akl from within a provisioning VM. Play the tunes.

philippe_48 · Post by **philippe_48** » 9. Oct 2008, 23:20

TerryE wrote:P, what are you trying to do? You leave too much unsaid in your Q. You can use ImDisk to loop mount a static VDI on an XP host. You can use VBoxManage or the SDK to configure your VM. So putting these together you can build VMs and launch them from a host based provisioning process.

You can also use a fixed Linux appliance, say a JeOS one plus hostSharing and fire it up and driver it akl from within a provisioning VM. Play the tunes.

I have created a static VDI file with Virtualbox. Then I have mounted this file with ImDisk. I have formatted this disk and copied a test file in this virtual disk. Then I have tried to mount this virtual disk in a virtual machine (with Virtualbox) and I received an error message VERR_VDI_INVALID_SIGNATURE...

How can I resolve this problem ?

Post by **Sasquatch** » 10. Oct 2008, 00:35

Recreate the VDI image (remove the current one and create a new one) and format it from within a VM. Now see if you can add a file with imdisk. I think the format caused your problem.

Post by **TerryE** » 10. Oct 2008, 03:57

remember that you must use a static format and specify an offset. This is 33280 for a disk of <= 128Mb . Add 512 bytes for each extra 128Mb.

virtualbox.org

Create a virtual disk from an existing physical machine

Create a virtual disk from an existing physical machine

there is not much instructins about in the VDI Tutorial ...