[conspire] (forw) Re: (forw) Re: VirtualBox

[Paul Zander]

Tony Godshall wrote:
>> Have you tried it?


I very much appreciate the suggestions of Tony and others. In the real world, this project running at a low duty cycle.
In part, because I need to learn about virtualization and also don't want to do something that can't be undone in case I get it wrong.

What I have done is get a rather large USB SSD that now has back-ups of the original windows installation partitions.  It also has the vmdk file.

Following Danial's advise I ordered a replacement drive for the laptop.  The original drive matched this description:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA2W02KN0946.

What I ordered is 1T HD with 8G SSD cache. 
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178340&cm_re=sshd_2.5-_-22-178-340-_-Product


A new drive, not "refurbished"   500GB drives were $60, for $25 more I get twice the memory.  Rather unusual for 2x storage to not cost at least 2x $.  Seagate has a part number for 32GB cache, but it is not available.


I also downloaded a fresh iso for Debian so I can install it on the new SSHD.


I also downloaded the Dell Manual, so I know exactly which screws to remove to swap the drive.

The drive is projected to arrive on Friday and I already have a busy weekend scheduled. :-(


Lastly, I kept detailed notes about the original disk and how to back up the partitions, etc. Some of that work seems less important since I will be archiving the disk itself in a box.



________________________________
From: Tony Godshall <togo at of.net>
To: Paul Zander <paulz at ieee.org> 
Cc: conspire <conspire at linuxmafia.com>
Sent: Monday, October 3, 2016 8:37 AM
Subject: Re: [conspire] (forw) Re: (forw) Re: VirtualBox


On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 12:26 PM, Paul Zander <paulz at ieee.org> wrote:
>> KVM's not hard to use.  You use -hda to give is a filename for a hard
>
>> drive and -cdrom to give it an iso file and -boot d to tell it to boot
>> from the iso for your install, and omit those two arguments
>> thereafter.
>
>
> Tony,
>
> You missed all the past discussion that there is no .iso.
>
> Just a .vmdk file created from the installed windows.
> There is good reason to expect that Virtual box will work with vmdk files.
> Possibly KVM will also work, but ...

The iso was not really the point, it was a generic install example.

https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=kvm%20vmdk

hey look, how to migrate vmdk files to kvm

and this: "KVM has the ability to use VMware's .vmdk disk files
directly, as long as the disk is wholly contained in a single vmdk

file."

So, yeah,

kvm --help
kvm -m 1024 -hda file.vmdk -boot d

Have you tried it?