physical to virtual (was: Re: copy installation from vm to bare metal -> kernel modules are missing)

[Karl Auer]

[starting a new thread so as not to hijack the old one]

On Thu, 2014-07-17 at 17:15 -0400, Robert Heller wrote:
> [regarding copying a VM to a physical machine)
> You need to boot with a rescue disk (installer disk) and then
re-generate the 
> init ramdisk.  The modules needed early in the boot process are loaded
into 
> the ramdisk with the mkinitrd program (mkinitrd is what I would use
with 
> CentOS or other RedHat type distros and I am assuming the same for
lubuntu).

Some time ago, I tried to do this in the opposite direction - virtualise
a physical machine. I want to virtualise an old Linux box before it
fails. I have had no luck at all.

There seem to be three main approaches - dd the disk then mount it in a
VM, or use the free VMWare converter (a Windows program), or use a
SysInternals utility called  Disk2Vhd (also a Windows program). I would
really like to do this without Windows, and tried the dd option, but got
symptoms very like those the OP was getting. That is, I had  good image,
but it would not boot. I'm wondering now if I needed to do something
along the lines you suggest (a topic I sadly know very little about -
yet).

If anyone out there has successfully done this, please get in touch.
Pointers to good resources would be appreciated too. I've just googled
"virtualize a physical machine using VirtualBox" and have found a few
good articles, but there is nothing like hearing from someone who has
actually done it with Linux.

Regards, K.

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