[Opensource] Cloning from a PC to a Virtual Box VM

[Dr Paul Chandler]

> Luke reflected that it would be great if we could just clone this
> partition and somehow copy it to Virtual Box to save us having to rebuild
> it from scratch for the Macbook laptop users who are using Virtual Box to
> access Windows XP (such as me)  .. not everybody is running a dual boot. I
> just did some research on the web and discovered this page that describes
> how it could be done between Virtual box VMs using Clonezilla. I think it
> could be adapted to help copy from a physical dive to a VM.
>      http://marcosaruj.com/archives/116
>
> I would like to revisit this again and welcome your ideas and suggestions
> how we could best achieve this.

If anyone does know how you can do it on a partition, then that would be
very interesting.  I know that under qemu (akin to virtualbox), I can't be
done because you need to specify a virtual (or real) DRIVE (eg hda), not a
partition (eg hda1) - it's all tied up with the OS's implementation of the
boot process.

Interestingly, the principal issue addressed in article Roland refers to
is reducing the size of the virtual drive.  This is not so much an issue
in qemu because its default format - QCOW2 - is much, much, much smaller
than a RAW partition, and you can readily convert between the two.


-- 
Dr Paul Chandler
Research Fellow
'Multimedia grammatical design and authoring pedagogy' (Kahootz) project,
School of Education, University of New England

located at Australian Children's Television Foundation
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e-mail: paul.chandler at une.edu.au
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