[GRLUG] VirtualBox question

[Bill Littlejohn]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 2:30 PM, John-Thomas Richards <jtr at jrichards.org>wrote:

> My laptop came with a restore partition for another OS.  I would like to
> install this operating system in a virtual machine with VirtualBox.  My
> Google-fu is failing me because all I can find is references to
> installing a virtual machine *into* a physical partition, not installing
> a virtual machine *from* a physical partition.  Anyone here have a clue
> if this is possible?
> --
> john-thomas
> ------
> Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is
> oblivion.
> Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)
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Sure - just copy the partition to a different drive.
There are a couple of ways I can think of.
What I would do requires an external USB hard drive of equivalent (or
larger) capacity to your laptop hard drive.
Boot from a live-cd, then dd your laptop drive to the USB drive. This will
overwrite anything on the USB drive with the copy.
Setup your VM and connect the USB drive to it. You should be able to boot
the restore partition from there.
I assume the drivers would be somewhat borked since it's likely preloaded
with your laptop hardware drivers. You'll want to install the virtual
hardware drivers as soon as possible to straighten things out.
Bill
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