Re: Converting a running system to a VirtualBox VM

[Marc Shapiro <marcnshap@gmail.com>]

On 03/03/2013 06:10 AM, Johan Grönqvist wrote:
> 2013-03-03 08:56, Marc Shapiro skrev:
> > So, does anyone know of a way to convert my current system to a
> > Virtualbox VM? Or would it be better to just create a new machine and
> > install from scratch? Getting Citrix Receiver running properly always
> > seems to be a hassle, so I thought that converting my current system
> > might be easier. Any suggestions?
>
>
> <http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch08.html#idp22220176>
>
> I _think_ you _might_ want to try booting to a live-cd, and run 
> something like
>
> VBoxManage convertfromraw /dev/sda/ vboximage.vdi
>
> Then try to boot the vboximage.vdi disk in vbox.
>
> When I used it, I did roughly:
>
> dd if=/dev/sda of=diskimage.dd
> VBoxManage convertfromraw diskimage.dd vboximage.vdi
>
> I have only tried it once, but it worked much better than I had 
> expected (yes, I was more pessimistic than I should have been).
This looks promising.  I will give it a try.  Since I have already 
installed Wheezy in a separate partition I should be able to boot to 
Wheezy and then create the .vdi from the Squeeze partition, instead of 
using a live CD.  Now I just have to get the other two people using this 
computed to save and close active files so that I CAN reboot.  That may 
take a while, but I will report back when I get a chance to try this.

Marc