[GRLUG] VirtualBox question

[John-Thomas Richards]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 02:43:11PM -0500, Bill Littlejohn wrote:
> 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?
> 
> 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

My drive is partitioned thusly:

/dev/sda1       /media/restore_partition
/dev/sda2       swap
/dev/sda3       /
/dev/sda4       /home

Is booting from a live CD necessary?
-- 
john-thomas
------
Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not.
Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?
Epicurus, philosopher (c.341-270 BCE)