Make Image of real Ubuntu hard drive from PC and run in VirtualBox on Mac

Question

I want create a image of my PC Laptop and run the image as a virtual machine on Mac OS.

I have already VirtualBox installed.

What can I do now?

Answer 1

Not quite a straightforward answer, but one that's likely to work is to create a live/installer disk off remastersys - in your case probably with the full system backup option, grab the ISO that generates and use that to do a 'fresh' install on your VM.

This should ensure your software, settings, users and files are moved over , while installing any additional HW that's needed, as well as other things.

Answer 2

OK. Never mind, I was wrong. Apparently it IS possible to clone a real hard disk by mounting a Ubuntu ISO in the virtual machine, then booting from it. After that:

1. Attach the physical drive as a USB device to the virtual machine (this method only works if it's a USB device).
2. Copy the contents of the device (usually /dev/sdb for example) to your VHD (usually /dev/sda). It would be relatively simple to write a program that does this. You probably wouldn't want to do it with cp /dev/sdb /dev/sda though. That could take a while, and you'd probably want some kind of buffering function.

Answer 3

Using rsync would let you clone the drive to an external, probably something like:

sudo rsync -avrogx / /path/to/volume

Can someone check me on this?