macrominds

In this article I’m going to show how to clone Sun VirtualBox VMs while it’s not supported natively.

If you don’t want to read the article, here’s a screencast:

Copy the virtual harddisk

• Open a command prompt.
• Change to the directory, where VirtualBox is installed. In my case, thats “C:\Program Files\Sun\xVM Virtual Box\”.
• In order to clone the hd, you are going to use VBoxManage clonehd. The first parameter you pass is the harddisk to copy, the second parameter is the new target harddisk
• Im my case, thats the command: VBoxManage clonehd “C:\Users\Thomas Praxl\.VirtualBox\HardDisks\UbuntuReady.vdi” “C:\Users\Thomas Praxl\.VirtualBox\HardDisks\UbuntuCopy.vdi”

Add the cloned harddisk to the media manager

• Open the Sun xVM VirtualBox client.
• Select “File”->”Manager for virtual Media”
• Select “Add..”
• Add the newly created harddisk

Create a new VM using the harddisk just created

• In the main screen of your xVM VirtualBox client, choose “New”
• Enter a name and the correct type of your VM. In my case, the type is Linux and Ubuntu.
• Choose “existing” when asked for a harddisk
• Select the freshly cloned harddisk (in my case UbuntuCopy.vdi)

PostProcessing / Guest Extensions

If you installed GuestExtensions in your original vm, you have to make the same settings to the new vm, as you did in the original one. For that, you select your new vm, press “Change” and enable 3D and the correct Audio-Driver for example. Just copy the settings from your original VM. Guest Extensions will be already installed.