Virtualising a physical machine

[Ron Fish]

On 03/02/2013 05:20 AM, Avi Greenbury wrote:
> 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
> :)
>
>
Clonezilla does it great....just clone the existing physical server, 
then create a new vm in Vbox, set the clonezilla ISO as the boot cd, and 
pull the image right onto the VDI of the new virt machine. I have to set 
the MAC to be the same on the new VM as on the physical host, otherwise 
the gateway gets confused. Although I suspect down the road this is 
gonna be a problem when the old host gets re-privisioned...LOL

Ron