<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 8:14 AM, John-Thomas Richards <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jtr@jrichards.org">jtr@jrichards.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 02:43:11PM -0500, Bill Littlejohn wrote:<br>
</div><div class="im">> On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 2:30 PM, John-Thomas Richards <<a href="mailto:jtr@jrichards.org">jtr@jrichards.org</a>>wrote:<br>
><br>
> > My laptop came with a restore partition for another OS. I would like to<br>
> > install this operating system in a virtual machine with VirtualBox. My<br>
> > Google-fu is failing me because all I can find is references to<br>
> > installing a virtual machine *into* a physical partition, not installing<br>
> > a virtual machine *from* a physical partition. Anyone here have a clue<br>
> > if this is possible?<br>
> > --<br>
> > john-thomas<br>
><br>
</div><div class="im">> Sure - just copy the partition to a different drive.<br>
> There are a couple of ways I can think of.<br>
> What I would do requires an external USB hard drive of equivalent (or<br>
> larger) capacity to your laptop hard drive.<br>
> Boot from a live-cd, then dd your laptop drive to the USB drive. This will<br>
> overwrite anything on the USB drive with the copy.<br>
> Setup your VM and connect the USB drive to it. You should be able to boot<br>
> the restore partition from there.<br>
> I assume the drivers would be somewhat borked since it's likely preloaded<br>
> with your laptop hardware drivers. You'll want to install the virtual<br>
> hardware drivers as soon as possible to straighten things out.<br>
> Bill<br>
<br>
</div>Here is what I have done so far. I created a 30GB virtual disk (should<br>
be more than enough for what I need; once this is up and running I can<br>
delete another sizable virtual disk that I will no longer need, thus<br>
freeing up more disk space). I then booted into that virtual machine<br>
with a Knoppix iso and created two partitions; one 10GB partition to<br>
hold the restore files and one 20GB partition to hold the operating<br>
system and applications. I was able to format both partitions with<br>
NTFS. I downloaded a Vista Recovery Disk iso that boots to install from<br>
the restore partition. It works up to the point it looks for the<br>
recovery files on the recovery partition. The problem is it cannot find<br>
the files on the restore partition since they are not there yet. For<br>
the life of me I cannot figure out this shared folders thing with a<br>
Linux host and a Linux guest (since I need to copy the files first).<br>
The VirtualBox user manual is not very helpful on this point.<br>
<font color="#888888">--<br>
john-thomas<br>
------<br>
I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the<br>
death, your right to say it.<br>
Voltaire (1694-1778)<br>
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</div></div></blockquote></div><br>I haven't used the shared folders feature, but certainly you would have to install the V.B. tools into the running livecd environment for it to work. I used an external USB drive instead.<br>
You can't access your system /dev/sda1 partition directly from the VM, because your running your system off that disk - thus the need to make a copy of the partition. <br>Assuming you have an external drive with enough free space attached as /dev/sdb, you could do<br>
"dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1/restore.img"<br>If you wanted to write the image to your home folder and then get folder sharing working, then you could do<br>"dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/home/me/restore.img"<br>
After you have the image file, and can access it from the VM, then just do the reverse _in the VM_ to write it to the virtual disk partition. i.e. "dd if=/dev/sdb1/restore.img of=/dev/sda1"<br>Be sure you understand where dd is reading and writing before executing the commands - it can hose your system quickly if you reverse the commands. "man dd"<br>
Bill<br><br>