VirtualBox - Physical to Virtual Machine - P2V

Usually I use Windows System Image Backup on Windows 7 to make a *.vhd of the physical machine and move it to VirtualBox and fire it up. That works fine.

Life is never easy. So I was given a task to migrate Xp Physical machine to VirtualBox. Xp doesn't have Windows System Image option so I was stuck.

I found Disk2Vhd which did the trick. All I had to do is boot the xp machine up and run the software and it created a vhd. Took few hours but end result was awesome.

All I had to on VirtualBox was to create new machine select the existing hard drive and point it to vhd(vhd created by Disk2Vhd) and boot it up.

Gotcha : Only works for Windows OS
Source : http://www.sysprobs.com/virtualbox-p2v-disk2vhd-errors-fix

Update :

Alrite I wanted to share problem i faced when running virtualbox vm(p2v) on optiplex 960. Xp won’t boot and kept on giving me bluescreens.

I ran the same VM on optiplex 780 and it worked fine and booted without a problem. So it was hardware based issue with 960 model.

After wasting 2 hours toggling with options and google i found the solution :-

1- Make sure in VM Settings (System / Processor – The option for Extended Features: Enable PAE/NX) is enabled.

2- From XP Safe Mode (Yes VM boots into Safe Mode) run this command from CLI “sc config intelppm start= disabled”