Creating a Virtualbox guest machine from a physical machine

I’ve got a Lenovo T60 , which I run Notes and Sametime on. It’s a nice machine but a pain to have to carry home every day if I want to work at home.

Another guy in the office mentioned that he had converted his work laptop into a VM, so he could work at home on his nice quick desktop machine. I run Ubuntu 9.04 on the laptop and Windows 7 at home.

The T60 has a pretty hectic partitioning scheme, LVM, ext4, encrypted partitions, the whole works. This procedure handled it all. It makes a ‘bit for bit’ copy of the drive, and I knew it should work, but am happy it did anyway.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Boot up using a live cd. I used an Ubuntu 9.04 disk.
2. Grab a external drive bigger that the entire internal drive. The T60 hard drive is only 100GB, so this wasn’t hard.
3. Use fdisk -l to figure out which drive is which. My internal drive was /dev/sda and the external was /dev/sdb
4. Mount the external drive, if it isn’t mounted. Let’s say it’s mounted at /media/external
5. Run dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/external/drive.img bs=4096

If you don’t have an external drive, you could use netcat or scp or something, and send the drive image over the wire instead. It’ll just be much slower.

6. Reboot the laptop, you don’t need it anymore.
7. Copy drive.img to the host machine. I’m running Virtual Box 3.06 on Windows 7.
8. Run this command to convert the raw disk image to a Virtual Box drive image file.

C:\Program Files\Sun\VirtualBox>VBoxManage.exe convertfromraw \
c:\drive.img c:\users\\.VirtualBox\Machines\laptop\drive.vdi


9. Create a new Virtual Box Guest in the usual way, and point it to the vdi file. I used a SATA controller since my laptop has one, but not sure if this matters or not.
10. Boot up your new guest machine.

Hey presto, it’s the same! Now I don’t have to carry my laptop home anymore. It seems to run a bit slower than the native machine, but that’s to be expected.

This would probably work for a Windows physical machine too, although I think you’d want to add an extra step at the beginning. On the Windows laptop, set the IDE controller to use the Microsoft driver, rather than your default driver before you take the image. That way, when the guest OS boots up, it will have access to a ‘lowest common denominator’ disk driver.