Virtualising a physical machine

[Karl Auer]

I have a physical server that I am trying to virtualise. I've googled my
little eyeballs out, and have managed to get this far:

- gparted to squeeze the server partition down to about 10GB
- gparted to move the partition to the front of the disk
- dd to take an image of the first 11GB of the disk
- sfdisk to clean up the partition table
- kpartx to set up a loopback device for the partition
- mounted the partition on loopback and fixed up fstab
- checked the mounted partition, everything looks good

At this point, the disk image is pretty much perfect :-) BUT - it locks
on booting in VirtualBox, the instant grub tries to boot the disk. The
various boot stanzas in grub's menu.lst mention UUIDs that are still
correct, all the kernels are still there in the image, the architecture
is still correct (i386, not ARM or anything) - in short, everything is
still where it should be, because this is after all an image of the
original disk.

What else is there that could cause such an immediate, complete failure?

Any hints welcomed, especially from someone who has actually tried - or
even succeeded! - in virtualising a physical machine.

Regards, K.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
http://www.biplane.com.au/blog

GPG fingerprint: B862 FB15 FE96 4961 BC62 1A40 6239 1208 9865 5F9A
Old fingerprint: AE1D 4868 6420 AD9A A698 5251 1699 7B78 4EEE 6017