Alternative way of converting physical disk to virtual

Question

I have a hard disk (60 GB, about 20 used) with windows XP I want to convert to a VirtualBox hard drive. I followed the instructions in [https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows] but the process was painfully slow. It completed about 3 GB in two days!

I guess maybe, only maybe, was due to the fact that the disk was NTFS and the image was written to another NTFS partition in a Linux environment. The process starts fine (first GB in about ten minutes) and then becomes slower and slower

Can the VBoxManage convertfromraw can be used somehow in windows to direclty read from the physical hard drive and create the virtual drive? Anybody could tell me why it gets so slow in Linux (Ubuntu server 13.04)?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 20 '17 at 10:16

a) Convert the disk to VHD format using http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx
b) Even if Virtualbox can use VHD format, I found better to convert it to its native format using
VBoxManage clonehd converted.vhd converted.vdi

The whole problem was indeed the painfully slow NTFS writing under Ubuntu, see NTFS write speed really slow (<15MB/s) on Ubuntu or google "ntfs slow on linux" but it seems there is no penalty reading from the NTFS drive, so maybe VBoxManage convertfromraw when writing to and ext partition will do fine (not tested)

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 28 '23 at 15:43

0

"C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" convertfromraw machine.dd machine.vdi

answered Apr 28 '23 at 15:43

Richard Barraclough

168

Alternative way of converting physical disk to virtual

2 Answers2