virtualbox – Creating a Virtual Machine from a Physical One

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Is there any way to create a virtual machine that you can use in VirtualBox from a physical installation that you have? For instance, if I have Windows XP installed on a physical computer and want to have a virtual version of that machine on a different computer. This would save a ton of time by not having to reinstall and reconfigure the whole OS.

I would think there would be issues with Microsoft's licensing. But even if it's not possible with Windows would it be possible to take a physical Linux machine and create a VirtualBox version of that? Does any other desktop virtualization software provide this feature?

Best Answer

Windows is a bit different, see How to migrate existing Windows installations to VirtualBox for a guide.

From memory you can use VMware's converter and VirtualBox will read VMDK files.

For Linux, if you want the easy solution, boot a live CD,

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/path/to/images/sda1.img bs=1024

Do that for every partition mounted in /etc/fstab of your machine, and then setup those images in VirtualBox.

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