How to convert a Virtual PC drive, to a VirtualBox drive

Virtual PC was one of the finer VM hosts for it’s time, until Microsoft bought it over in 2003, it isn’t as cool any more. Especially since they removed the printer port support, as I posted here. No jokes.

VirtualBox now supports Virtual PC .vhd drives, so I created a new VirtualBox machine, added the old .vhd file as a slave drive, and did a direct data transfer from old drive to new. It worked a treat and the new VM is an exact copy of the old, but runs off the native VirtualBox .vdi file.

You will need: VirtualBox, your old Virtual PC .vhd file, a bootable Live CD or an ISO of one.

Create a new virtual machine with a blank drive the same size (or bigger) as the old drive; Attach the old drive to the VM as a slave.

Now boot the Live CD on the VM, I used an Ubuntu Live CD. Once in, load up a terminal and lets get cracking:

List the drives, to see their device mappings:

sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 2147 MB
Disk /dev/sda doesn't contain a valid partition table
-
Disk /dev/sdb: 20 MB
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 601 20425+ 4 FAT16

We can spot our our .vhd to copy is sdb, and the new drive sda doesn’t have a partition table. So we direct copy from sdb, to sda:

sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda &

The ampersand “&” will run the command in the background, print out the process id, and return control to the terminal. If the disks are large (10GB+) it might take a few minutes. To print out progress, send a USR1 signal to the process, using the id it printed out:

kill -USR1 1234

You’ll know it’s done when dd prints out the final stats (and the dd process has died, too). Shut down the VM, remove the old .vhd drive and you’re done. Happy Boxing!