[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?
> > --
> > john-thomas
> 
> 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

Here is what I have done so far.  I created a 30GB virtual disk (should
be more than enough for what I need; once this is up and running I can
delete another sizable virtual disk that I will no longer need, thus
freeing up more disk space).  I then booted into that virtual machine
with a Knoppix iso and created two partitions; one 10GB partition to
hold the restore files and one 20GB partition to hold the operating
system and applications.  I was able to format both partitions with
NTFS.  I downloaded a Vista Recovery Disk iso that boots to install from
the restore partition.  It works up to the point it looks for the
recovery files on the recovery partition.  The problem is it cannot find
the files on the restore partition since they are not there yet.  For
the life of me I cannot figure out this shared folders thing with a
Linux host and a Linux guest (since I need to copy the files first).
The VirtualBox user manual is not very helpful on this point.
-- 
john-thomas
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