Is it possible to export a VirtualBox drive to a “real” hard drive?

Question

I have a Windows 7 VM on my Mac OS X VirtualBox Host. The virtual drive is a dynamically-expanding with a limit of 20GB.

Is it possible to export the .vdi virtual hard drive to a real, physical hard drive, to put into a real, physical computer?

I have an external case to mount an IDE drive to USB, and can pass that through to VB, but just copying all the files on the virtual drive won't copy things like boot sectors.

Also, if I can do this, would I have to re-activate Windows, or do anything special?

Answer 1

There's a risk Windows won't survive the hardware change.

Still if you connect your physical disk to the vm and boot from the ISO image of a ghosting utility you may be able to do this.

Answer 2

More than likely anyway that you export a virtual machine to a physical machine, you're going to end having to reactivate it. One, the system will notice that the hardware is different (motherboard, harddrive, RAM, processor, videocard). Two, you going to find that Windows will need to find drivers for any specific hardware that is installed on the machine (video, NIC, sound, etc). Last, if you reactivate windows on the new hardware, your licenese for the OS will not allow you to keep the virtual up and running also. It's a grey area, but typicaly you can only have one instance of the OS running at a time (though I doubt that the EULA police will raid your home for this). Just remember that.

Good luck on your project and hope this helps some.

Answer 3

You might be able to do this with an imaging program such as Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image. And possibly using the dd command in OS-X. Microsoft also has a tool available for deploying Windows 7 images. See this for more info.