So I’ve been using virtual machines much more frequently recently, but only new VM’s that I’ve created. This weekend was my first attempt at P2V (physical to virtual). I have a decent XP dual core machine that has served me well for the last 2 years, but after my upgrade to a nice I7 Win7 laptop, there’s no going back.

However, the dual core is still very useful. Beyond a useful test rig for XP, it’s also my only way to get a true IE6 platform to test my web apps. Yes, I know there are many alternatives (Multiple IE’s, Spoon.net, etc.). Still sometimes, you have obscure bugs that you absolutely can not reproduce without a native installation. On top of that, when debugging with tools like MS Visual Web Developer that’s usually beyond the capabilities of the alternatives.

So why not just use Virtual PC and MS’s Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Images? Because MS purposefully cripples Win7 Home Premium from using Virtual PC.

Also if I could successfully transfer my physical machine to a virtual one, I’d have access to all my old apps and a system that I backup easily and perfectly forever.

So which route – VirtualBox or VMWare? Both are free (if you only need VMWare player), but VMWare still dominates virtually, right? (Of course, there’s some dispute.) Plus, when looking over the instructions for P2V, there was no contest. VMWare provides a nice converter, and VirtualBox had so many additional requirements/steps (not the least of which was another OS).

Unfortunately, VMWare was not to be. I tried the converter a few times – making sure all the right services where stopped or started as needed, and it looked promising up to the very end but ultimately – BSOD.

So take two with VirtualBox, fortunately, I have my Ubuntu CD, so I could use dd to copy the entire disk (not just the windows partition), and then apt-get the VBoxManage software.

Time to convert the image. First, I shared the newly cloned image on my USB external drive with my Ubuntu VM (also running on VirtualBox)

mkdir /mnt/share
sudo mount -t vboxsf shared /mnt/share
cd /mnt/share
VBoxManage convertfromraw ImageFile.dd OutputFile.vdi

It was a tedious process taking hours to clone, convert, and complete but required little monitoring. Now ready to boot again and … Bam – no further than “XLDR -ATA error”.

I thought I was stuck now, and starting to wonder how anyone was doing P2V. Though after some quick googling, I found this post. So mounted the XP CD, booted to recovery console, fixmbr, fixboot, and I was on my way again. That is until it was time to reactive my XP installation (argh! I got it to work but was considering using WGA Killer if need be.)

It was a long ordeal, and in retrospect, I probably could have gone further with my VMWare diagnosis. I should have tried the recovery console for those BSOD’s as well.

Still, I’m up and running and a little bit wiser. I think.

Now it’s time to resize and play with gparted. A more thorough guide is here.