Can I turn a virtualbox machine into a real partition?

[mtgmutton]

I have a WindowsXP virtualbox machine on my Linux Mint box. I have recently decided to mod my Xbox360, which requires mounting the Xbox360's drive to the computer. Xplorer360 crashes,so I need to either make the virtual machine a real partition that is separately bootable, or find a replacement for Xplorer360 that is linux-friendly. The former seems much more likely. Can anyone help me?

[caljohnsmith]

I think probably the easiest way to transfer your VirtualBox OS to a partition would be to mount it, and then copy its entire file system to its new partition with "cp -ax" to preserve all the proper permissions/ownerships of all files. Most VirtualBox VDI files have just 3 sectors of VirtualBox header info at the beginning, and then the rest is the HDD image. So to mount a VDI file, you can usually do:

sudo losetup -f --show -o $((512*3)) ~/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/HDD_image.vdi

That will also return the loop device that the VDI file gets associated with, for example "/dev/loop0". And then to see the partitions in that image:

sudo fdisk -lu /dev/loop0

Using the above command, find the sector offset of the partition you want to mount, say for example the starting sector is 63, then do:

sudo mount -o loop,offset=$((512*63)) /dev/loop0 /mnt

And that will mount your VirtualBox OS partition on /mnt. After that, it's just a matter of copying the file system to its new partition:

sudo cp -ax /mnt/* /path_to_mounted_destination_partition/

And lastly, if you do:

sudo blkid -c /dev/null

It will show you the UUID of your mounted VirtualBox partition, and you can transfer that UUID to the new partition with:

sudo tune2fs -U <VirtualBox partition UUID> /dev/<new partition>

You will probably have to modify /boot/grub/menu.lst and possibly /etc/fstab for the OS on the new partition, but that should be about all it takes. Let me know if you decide to give this method a try and how it goes.

[mtgmutton]

Thanks much, I will try this soon

[mtgmutton]

On this command...

sudo fdisk -lu /dev/loop0

Disk /dev/loop0: 32.2 GB, 32212376576 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3916 cylinders, total 62914798 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0000016e

Disk /dev/loop0 doesn't contain a valid partition table

I'm not sure what the starting sector is... is it 63?

[caljohnsmith]

So did you mount your VDI file with the first losetup command that uses the 3 sector offset? If so, maybe the HDD image in the .vdi file starts at a different sector. How about posting the output of:

hexdump -C -n10000 HDD_image.vdi | grep -A1 "55 aa"

But replace HDD_image.vdi with your own .vdi image file.

[mtgmutton]

there was no output that I could see... nothing happened

[caljohnsmith]

You have to either give the path to your .vdi file, or you have to navigate to that directory using "cd" in the terminal. In other words, if your .vdi file is in your .VirtualBox directory, you might do something like:

hexdump -C -n10000 ~/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/HDD_image.vdi | grep -A1 "55 aa"

If you have problems, copy/paste exactly what you have in the terminal to your next post so I can see what you are doing.

[mtgmutton]

I listed the entire directory the first time, but nothing happened... so I tried again by cd-ing first, which produced the same results.

 hexdump -C -n10000 ~/.VirtualBox/VDI/WinXP.vdi | grep -A1 "55 aa"

[caljohnsmith]

OK, how about posting:

ls -l /home/evan/.VirtualBox/VDI
hexdump -C -n10000 /home/evan/.VirtualBox/VDI/WinXP.vdi

[mtgmutton]

ok for

ls -l /home/evan/.VirtualBox/VDI

i got this:

total 31488164
-rw------- 1 evan evan 32212378112 2009-02-16 18:33 WinXP.vdi

and for

hexdump -C -n10000 /home/evan/.VirtualBox/VDI/WinXP.vdi

i get.... it's really long... it takes up WAY more than one terminal window. is it possible to get the terminal to put command output into a txt file?