[GRLUG] VirtualBox question

[John-Thomas Richards]

On Thu, Mar 05, 2009 at 11:05:37AM -0500, Bill Littlejohn wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 8:14 AM, John-Thomas Richards <jtr at jrichards.org>wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 02:43:11PM -0500, Bill Littlejohn wrote:
[snip]
> > > 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
> 
> 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.
> 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.
> Assuming you have an external drive with enough free space attached as
> /dev/sdb, you could do
> "dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1/restore.img"
> If you wanted to write the image to your home folder and then get folder
> sharing working, then you could do
> "dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/home/me/restore.img"
> 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"
> 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"
> Bill

VirtualBox OSE does not appear to have USB support.  I am running the
latest in Debian Squeeze (2.1.4_OSE).  I have the restore partition on a
USB drive, ready to copy to the virtual drive, but I cannot access them.
I am trying to figure out shared folders.  Once I have the files copied
to the virtual drive, I am sure I won't have a problem.

Thanks for the help!
-- 
john-thomas
------
There is no opinion so absurd that some philosopher will not express it.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, "Ad familiares"