I'm looking for a way to clone sector by sector of my physical disk to my VDI virtual disk. As I was reading, some do not recommend the use of dd for this.
If I can not use dd to copy sector by sector and restore the image inside virtualbox, what else is there to do this?
Keep in mind: The image must include the information of each sector (even if it is not assigned) as I want to do information retrieval and forensic tests within VirtualBox.
Operating system: Ubuntu
Best Answer
You are trying to do Physical-to-Virtual, where
dd
is a possible tool but not the best.As it isn't recommended to copy the running system from within itself. The process below comes from the article Physical To Virtual (P2V) using VirtualBox and requires:
Here is the procedure. The author describes how to copy one partition, so you will need to modify this slightly to virtualize the whole disk. This is required for including the boot code.
I have not performed the above procedure myself, and some steps might have changed in some small detail since the above was published, but the general steps should still be the same.