My requirements for P2V Windows XP to VirtualBox
Here are several of my requirements :- existing installation of windows XP on /media/system partition (NTFS) which can be seen from MandrivaLinux (installed on the same laptop)
- I do not want to tamper with existing installation of XP, if not booting it is possible, that would be fine for me (in order to do everything from GNU/Linux)
- the existing partition for Windows is 49 GB (with only 13 GB used), if the resulting image with VirtualBox is ~14 GB it will be fine (I have not that much disk to dedicate to the operation, though resizing/shrinking the current windows partition is still possible...
Sys. de fichiers Taille Uti. Disp. Uti% Monté sur /dev/sda7 27G 23G 3,0G 89% / /dev/sda5 32G 5,9G 27G 19% /media/data # data (used both by windows & GNU/Linux) /dev/sda1 49G 13G 37G 26% /media/system # system (only used by windows)
For obvious reasons, I worked on a vmwin.dd version of my windows partition obtained with dd, _and_ on another computer with suficient room : 50 GB partition to store VMs (should not have been connected to Internet, but... well)
Some documentations
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows found among many tutorialshttp://www.vmware.com/products/converter/
http://www.artiflo.net/2009/01/convertir-une-image-virtuelle-vmware-vmdk-dun-windows-en-virtual-box-vdi/
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=1404 some questions in my context : how to start from already installed windows to create a vdi, does not seem trivial (not yet tried)
http://blog.subaquatic.net/archives/virtualbox-p2v-success/ o_O using VMware free (as in free beer) tools, why not use VirtualBox tools ?
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=9697
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=769883
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=1966 manage VDIs and import native installations
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=1404
Simple version
http://regx.dgswa.com/html/content/how-move-windows-virtualbox that shouldn't work as easily...fdisk -l dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/data/vm/xp.dd # change /data/vm to the actual directory VBoxManage convertdd /data/vm/xp.dd /data/vm/xp.vdi
http://www.pjsquared.com/blog/?p=169 another method with vmconverter by VMware which should work better
For 16 GB : begin at 22h27 of dd, end at 22h38 (apparently I've got 50 MB I/O throughput which should take me approximately 5 minutes to end up, or rather 10 minutes if I/O include read/writes : 16 GB * 1024 / 50 MB/s / 60 seconds * 2 to get the result in minutes )
ok confirmed :
[root@localhost vm]# dd if=/dev/sda1 of=vmwin.dd 34587882+0 enregistrements lus 34587882+0 enregistrements écrits 17708995584 octets (18 GB) copiés, 695,955 s, 25,4 MB/s
du -k ; du -m ; du -h # shows (kB, MB, GB...)
17293952
16889
17G
- At approximately 70 MB writing on disk, it should end up in 5 min (well, yes it took 5 min :D)
VBoxManage convertdd vmwin.dd vmwin.vdi Converting from raw image file="vmwin.dd" to file="vmwin.vdi"... Creating dynamic image with size 17708995584 bytes (16889MB)...
- first boot of VM newly created using vmwin.vdi results only in a black screen and 1 CPU running at 100% till stopping the VM :/ some possible reasons :
- http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1016613 boot.ini configured with the parameter /burnmemory = 4096, the RAM is reduced to 4 GB (reduces the RAM another 4 GB, which leaves the virtual machine with 0 GB of RAM o_O)
reasons for black screen of death when migrating windows xp to VirtualBox
looking for the reason why I've got a black screen, cursor blinking when first booting windows migrated to VirtualBoxapparently not related
https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/4942 due to upgrade
https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/1633 due to guest additions
https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&p=99321 due to upgrade
http://www.itwriting.com/blog/1538-fixing-a-virtualbox-windows-xp-blue-screen.html blue screen when moving VM
intelppm.sys virtualbox
https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/420
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows There are a few Windows device drivers that does not play nice on VirtualBox' hardware. A similar problem may exist with intelppm.sys, which can also cause a hang of the guest OS.
