I have a bunch of VirtualBox VMs (Linux and Windows) and would like to know how to transfer any of them to the metal.
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I'm not sure if you can do this with windows guests. I'll outline what I would do first to move any VM to physical disk, and some "hints" which may help with windows.
So, in general, you need an image of the virtual hard drive:
Check which drives are available (following is a snippet):
$ VBoxManage list hdds Oracle VM VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.2.10_OSE (C) 2005-2010 Oracle Corporation All rights reserved. UUID: d6b9f0a5-98df-48ca-83c8-91a0809ec349 Parent UUID: base Format: VDI Location: /home/wena/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/Debian 6.vdi State: created Type: normal Usage: Debian 6 (UUID: f070af5c-57b1-47db-9300-f17921dee57d) [1 pristine fresh install (UUID: 90e46b07-07d9-4b81-9b7b-dadd75fc13f4)] UUID: dfd7deec-b7a7-4e83-967e-17aa8fb1f602 Parent UUID: d6b9f0a5-98df-48ca-83c8-91a0809ec349 Format: VDI Location: /home/wena/.VirtualBox/Machines/Debian 6/Snapshots/{dfd7deec-b7a7-4e83-967e-17aa8fb1f602}.vdi State: created Type: normal Usage: Debian 6 (UUID: f070af5c-57b1-47db-9300-f17921dee57d)
Select UUID above and convert it:
VBoxManage clonehd d6b9f0a5-98df-48ca-83c8-91a0809ec349 --format RAW Debian6.img
Then, just copy this image to a harddrive, using dd.
This should work for most Linux machines.
For windows, chances are, that you may have a lot of troubles. I would start with creating a new hardware profile in the VM before I even try.
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Windows may complain about the HDD controller changing. See this MS knowledgebase article or search for MergeIDE. – Not Sure May 15 '11 at 20:11
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Mounting thought loopback device with offset
, might be helpful.
VDIfile=VirtData.vdi
mountingpoint=/mnt/VDI
offData=$( VBoxManage internalcommands dumphdinfo "$VDIfile" |grep offData | sed 's:.*offData=\([0-9]*\).*:\1:' )
offset=$(( $offData + 32256 ))
mount -t ext4 -o rw,noatime,noexec,loop,offset="$offset" "$VDIfile" "$mountingpoint"
More details here: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/45019/9689

Grzegorz Wierzowiecki
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