Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

I've been watching posts and discussions on this all over the net and it still looks fairly painful and requires old releases of stuff from VMWare.

Does anybody have a simple recipe for converting a physical Windows install to a VirtualBox install? I'm trying to wean a certain family member off Windows co-dependence and I have a better idea what I want to do with that box anyway!

I have a theory but I haven't had time to try it. I was thinking of using partimage to make an image of the installed system. Then I would create a new vdi under VirtualBox and boot the partimage CD in VBox and restore the image into the vdi. Now I have a real/fake installed Windows system in VBox. But I know Windows is very touchy about actual configurations and will probably burp and bluescreen from the hardware changes. If nobody has any better ideas or if somebody knows this can't work, be nice and save me some time

If nobody says anything and I have time to try it I will let you know.

--
Friends don't let friends let Windows touch real hardware
Just say "No!" to Windows -- Because a computer is a terrible thing to waste

I would expect you to run into issues where the emulated hardware isn't close enough to the actual metal, and drivers aren't installed. What you might have some luck with is producing a sysprep image from the installed OS. This should roll in everything that's there, but do some first-time setup like drivers when you boot it for the first time.

I made one of these for WinXP to quickly refresh clients' virus-riddled installations to something usable at one time. Never really used it though.

Depending on the version of Windows, there's also the issue of Windows activation. If it's XP or newer, you may or may not be able to activate Windows on the VM without an activation code. (The exception is if the version of Windows had been activated under certain enterprise licensing terms, in which case you may not need to enter license codes, etc.)

Thankfully I don't understand Windows but the drivers needed for VirtualBox seem more likely to be installed than the drivers for my mobo, etc. on the PC it's installed on now since I had to install them from a CD when I installed XP on that box. I'm thinking it's more about Windows detecting something changed than not having drivers. But you may be right.



Sounds interesting. What is sysprep and is it free? I'll go a'lookin' and a'searchin'.

Thanks

I don't remember having needed an activation code for this. It is an old install of XP from around 2002/2003. Thank you.

There may also be issues if the OS is an OEM version - I think it is tied (from a legal perspective) to the motherboard, so a virtual machine is new and can't reuse the same license. Also, it may not be legally or technically possible to reactivate or use some application software. For example, if you have an OEM version of Office installed, it is probably tied to the machine you originally have it on. Virtualisation of legacy systems is great in theory, but much more of a hassle when its not an open source setup.

Wikipedia delivers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysprep

I have to say I was (mis-)remembering that it was built in, apparently not. Still google should provide

Provided that you're running the (single) copy of Windows XP that was licensed on the mainboard on a VM running on that mainboard I think you could make a strong case that it is within the license (since you are running a single copy of the licensed software on the licensed machine). The sad part is that you might really need to make a case in court, as MS' approach seems to be a blanket "you have to buy another license" in most cases, and they're very creative sometimes.

You don't need anything special. I used to boot my laptop's Windows XP partition both directly and in VMware from Linux (yes, this is possible).

- Make sure you have installed all drivers for virtual hardware (you may have to install it directly from the .inf files, since installers detect that they're not running on the actual hardware - VMware does this, e.g.)
- Create a second hardware profile in Windows, and tell it to prompt for the proper profile everytime it boots

When you boot virtualized, select the new "virtual" profile you created. It'll take a while to configure all drivers the first time. After that... walk in the park.

I've successfully used disk2vhd to p2v an xp box into a Virtualbox .vhd file. Had to re-activate Windows and fix a few minor issues with drivers...etc.

Why not approach the issue from the opposite direction and install the FOS operating system into a virtual machine on the existing, already running and licensed, copy of Windows?

Should eliminate most of the installation and licensing headaches - not to mention another page and a half of philosophical differences of opinion.

My comments were based on my understanding of how VirtualBox is implemented - that the motherboard is software emulated (so what is presented is different to the underlying hardware motherboard), and the official MS policy would be not to reactivate or allow the OEM license on this (based on the terms I quoted).


... I'm not really trying to get into philosophical debates with anyone here. Just speaking from personal experience on the practical licensing issues it raises (and bearing in mind the policy about certain software discussions here). I have a secondary PC that is old but has a software installation that is useful for various reasons to keep, and I wanted to do something similar (but not a home system, an important difference I guess). I decided it was not worth the hassle in the end to virtualise (even with a department of salaried lawyers). To each his own.

"Friends don't let friends let Windows touch real hardware." It's just offensive. From a practical angle, Windows is hardly noted for stability and running anything under it is clearly A Bad Thing



There are always certain people who like to play internet lawyers and create FUD. Lucky for me I have six lawyers in my family. I put the fudmeisters on ignore so I don't even see the idiotic comments after the first time. Good forum feature btw

Sorry I didn't update this thread until now. I was going to use the capture utility somebody pointed me to in this thread but my installed system was big enough to just go over the biggest USB drive I have, so I couldn't actually try it. Disappointing. The system is now installed in VirtualBox where it doesn't have to take up much space or monopolize perfectly good crappy hardware.

So in the end how did you complete the transfer/installation of the OS to the Virtual Box?????

I have an old PC with installed software that I would like on modern, faster hardware and I 'm lazy and don't want to do all the software reinstalls if I can just convert an image.

I just did a new install in vbox and then then used Windows "user settings and files transfer wizard". It is far from perfect but at least it got the email set up properly. Without passworss though, idiots! It doesn't appear to save almost any app, but the person this is for didn't need all the crap on the system anyway so now the system is smaller and has only what's needed.

For moving the system as is, the tool suggested by somebody in this thread is the first thing to try if you have a big enough USB drive. You won't know how much USB drive you need until you run it. The other thing I don't like about that tool is it doesn't seem to let you resize your system. For me the system was installed on a whole drive but needed actually only a small fraction of that. I was too busy and lazy to go burn a gparted live CD but that would have been another thing that probably could have helped me at least see if the tool worked. Since I want Windows totally out of existence I didn't have the patience to run down every possible alternative. For me the best alternative is no Windows at all and I'm working on this now. It was part of my plan all along. It will free up a box and get the person to learn UNIX as an end-user enough to do email, word processing etc. Now we are closer to that. Windows will soon be gone. Oh, happy, happy day!

The vbox forums have suggested approaches for doing this migration also. If you have a system you really want to preserve as is only you can decide if the stupid computer tricks and hoop jumping are worth it. For me this is one of the reasons I hate Windows so much. I've moved complete Linux installations around quickly and with no difficulty. Windows is painful from beginning to end. I just want it to GO AWAY!!!

I tried using VMware's vCenter Converter Standalone to scarf up a Thinkpad T61p w/ XP, but it kept failing during the last phases when it tries to fix up the resulting virtualized image. Maybe because I was including the "extra" partition(s) with boot managers, hibernation image, or whatever. I'll have to try again without those...

Did go ahead and try disk2vhd, which would start so long as I ignored everything but the C: drive. Copying that over to a FreeBSD host now...

Tried to get vCenter Converter to turn the resulting VHD into something else just for kicks, but apparently that's not a supported format.