Virtualising a physical machine

[Avi Greenbury]

Karl Auer wrote:
> 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. 

I've never tried this with VirtualBox, but it's worked in almost
exactly this way for me several times with Xen. The difference being
that I use a new xen-generic kernel and initrd for it. 

Does your lockup happen in grub (suggesting that Grub's not being
loaded) or as it tries to boot the kernel (suggesting that that
mechanism is a bit broken)? 

I'd be tempted to install another system next to this one in
Virtualbox, such that they each have the same drive. Then boot into
grub in the new system and modify the kernel line such that the kernel
and initrd used are of the new install, but the root= argument to the
kernel points at the new disk, and see if that gets you anywhere. I
can't think how that would help, but it's probably what I'd do anyway
:)


-- 
Avi