virtualbox.org

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

Thanks you for all your suggestions

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

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.

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.

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 ?

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.

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.