Creating a virtual machine in VirtualBox from a physical one

Is there any way to create a virtual machine that you can use in VirtualBox from a physical installation that you have? For instance, if I have Windows XP installed on a physical computer and want to have a virtual version of that machine on a different computer. This would save a ton of time by not having to reinstall and reconfigure the whole OS.

I would think there would be issues with Microsoft's licensing. But even if it's not possible with Windows would it be possible to take a physical Linux machine and create a VirtualBox version of that? Does any other desktop virtualization software provide this feature?

Solution 1:

Windows is a bit different, see How to migrate existing Windows installations to VirtualBox for a guide.

From memory you can use VMware's converter and VirtualBox will read VMDK files.

For Linux, if you want the easy solution, boot a live CD,

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/path/to/images/sda1.img bs=1024

Do that for every partition mounted in /etc/fstab of your machine, and then setup those images in VirtualBox.

Solution 2:

Windows is pretty easy to clone to virtual machine with Microsoft tool called Disk2vhd. You can do it on a running Windows system as I did with my Windows 2008 server.

1. download Disk2vhd and extract it to some folder.
2. Start the software and choose which partition you want to clone.
3. Wait for the cloning to finish, in my case this took about 50 minutes
4. Copy the resulting .vhd file to your virtual machine host.
5. Start your virtual machine software and make a new VM.
6. Mount the disk on the VM you just made and boot.
7. If everything went right you should now have a clone of your Windows system running in a VM

If you are migrating a Windows installation to VirtualBox you might want to check out the how-to on on the VirtualBox website

Solution 3:

I prefer the network cloning methods using a live CD or ISO images (Clonezilla, Ghost, etc. there are many to choose from). See my previous post regarding increasing disk size in virtual machines.

The network cloning methods work physical to physical, physical to virtual, virtual to virtual and between any virtualization platforms supporting booting to ISO/CD.

You shouldn't use APIC anyway unless using a laptop or you need extra interrupts (lots of addin cards, old ports still being used, etc.). PIC is much better for physical machines if you're doing anything realtime based like audio/video, CNC, etc.. These days with USB and eSATA interrupt stacking isn't as often needed as before.

Solution 4:

To do this...Shutdown Windows or whatever you are using

Force Boot a live linux CD.

Open a terminal window and type:

sudo dd if=/dev/YOUR DEVICE (hdd,cdrom) of=A UNIQUENAME.iso (WINBoot,cd5,Hacktoolz).iso.

In the command... 'if' is Input File (or source) and 'of' is Output File (or destination).

This takes your OS HDD or OS install CDROM and creates an ISO from it in FILE format and stores it in your Homedir.

Open VitrualBox and Create your new VM.

Right click the VM, select settings, click Mount a CDROM, Select Mount an ISO or Image file.

Select ADD.

Browse and Locate the ISO you created with the "sudo dd if=/dev/cdrom of=cd5.iso" command.

Select it and double click it (or hit OK).

Click OK.

Start the VM.

Voila! Your boot OS HDD or CDROM is now running in a VM ;-)

Solution 5:

Most virtualization software has the ability to run an installation straight off the physical drive or from an image made from that drive.

For example, I've routinely created images from hard drives using "dd" and then "booted" the installation on that image using Qemu under FreeBSD. Other than the OS having some issues with the new virtual hardware, things worked as expected.