[GRLUG] VirtualBox question

[John-Thomas Richards]

On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 10:06:27AM -0500, Bill Littlejohn wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 8:58 AM, John-Thomas Richards <jtr at jrichards.org>wrote:
> 
> > 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
> >
> 
> No, booting from a live cd isn't necessary. That's just a simple way to get
> the bootloader and the restore partition onto the second drive without
> worrying too much about partition tables and boot loaders.
> When I did this, I setup the disk more or less how I thought the restore
> expected the disk to look like.
> I copied the bootloader and the restore partition to the target drive, and
> had a a second partition there just so the number of partitions was right.
> The restore isn't likely to ask anything and will put everything on the
> second partition. That worked out fine in my case.
> Can you tell me how big those partitions are, how much space is available,
> and where you want to put your new VM?
> Bill

me at rondo:~$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3              28G  9.8G   17G  38% /
/dev/sda4             108G   65G   38G  64% /home

The VM would go into /home/me.

Would it work to make an .iso out of the partition?  I can install from
an .iso in VB.
-- 
john-thomas
------
As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy
death.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)