A few days ago, my epia device gave up it’s live. So I was looking for a temporary alternative to start the harddisk.
Looking back it was very easy to get it run in my desktop, to get the data I’m storing on it. (A little database and some Webservices)
Here you can read how you get an existing OS into your VirtualBox.
I took the disk put it into an external case and created an image with dd. So far so good. I saved the disk with
dd if=/dev/sdc bs=16065b of=./epia.dmp
After this it was a very small step I just had to convert it into a readable form for VirtualBox. This was not much more than getting the raw image.
In my kubuntu with the VirtualBox OSE 3.2.8 I could convert it to a vdi with VBoxManage.
VBoxManage convertfromraw epia.dmp epia.vdi
After this step I could create a new VirtualMachine and get the image as the harddisk.
I don’t know how long everything needed because I left the computer between the single steps. But every step needed about 2 – 3 hours for a disk with a capacity around 200 GB.
Some facts about the systems.
epia:
CPU: Atom
OS: Up to date Gentoo
HD: 200 GB
Workstation:
CPU: Core 7i, 2,9 GHz
OS: Kubuntu
VirtualBox: OSE, 3.2.3
