Virtualbox Windows 7 32 Bit Image Download

[Elia Khensamphanh]

Even if I'm able to convert the image, will it break? The VirtualBox wiki suggested that I need to run MergeIDE before taking the system image, which I didn't do, and now I've already uninstalled Windows. So will I need to reinstall it and make a proper backup?

"No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found," error code 0x80042412. But it can see the system disk, diskpart says it's online at SATA port 0. And I haven't selected it for exclusion. It just seems not to be able to read the disk.

After some searching I believe the new error is due to the fact that my virtual drive is smaller than the drive that was imaged (even though the actual space used was much less, the drive itself was large). I don't have enough room on any of my drives to accommodate a 1TB virtual disk, so I guess I'm stuck.

FYI for future readers of this post: I think this would have worked if I had enough HDD space. At the least, it should be possible to restore an image into a virtual disk. But it's still unknown whether Windows would boot without the registry changes made by MergeIDE.

There is no direct Windows System Image to Virtual Machine conversion I am aware of, but since you have the system image, why not just start the Windows install process and use the system image as the source and restore it into a new virtual machine?

Boot from your install media, and when prompted if you would like install windows or restore from a backup - choose the restore option and select your system image backup as the source. My only advice would be try to configure your virtual machine to match your previous hardware (making adjustments as necessary for disk space, processor count, RAM, etc.).

Have you tried the Sysinternals (Microsoft) Disk2Vhd utility? It'll create a VHD with which Virtualbox is compatible. You'll then need to import this as a disk and create the Virtualbox VM itself to configure the settings.

Is it possible to do this so that the image is transferred over network connection to some other computer? Or is it even possible to resize the partition on the fly to get rid of unnecessary amount of free space?

When you use VMWare Converter you can tell it to save the image to a network drive or a USB drive or something. Sadly it will be as large as your windows partition is. You could always resize your Windows partition to be smaller and then create the VM (that's what I have done in the past).

There's a command line program to manage your virtualbox session. You can't just copy the image and use it. The utility can clone a disk image so you can reuse it under another virtual machine. It's in the help file. Search for 'clone'. You can then copy the file that contains the new cloned disk image anywhere you like.

There's a utility to zero out the unused portions of your disk. The side effect of using it on a virtual box machine is that the virtual disk image manager will shrink the image file size. Something like this one

I've written a couple posts on how to create vagrant boxes for windows and how to try and get the base image as small as possible. These posts explain the multiple steps of preparing the base box and then the process of converting that box to the appropriate format of your preferred hypervisor. This can take hours. I cringe whenever I have to refresh my vagrant boxes. There is considerable time involved in each step: downloading the initial ISO from microsoft, installing the windows os, installing updates, cleaning up the image, converting the image to any alternate hypervisor formats (I always make both VirtualBox and Hyper-V images), compacting the image to the vagrant .box file, testing and uploading the images.

This post shows a way that ends much of this agony and adds considerable predictability to a successful outcome. The process can still be lengthy, but there is no baby sitting. Type a command, go to sleep and you wake up with new windows images ready for consumption. This post is a culmination of my previous posts on this topic but on steroids...wait...I mean a raw foods diet - its 100% automated and repeatable.

If you want to quickly jump into things and forgo the rest of this post or just read it later, just read the bit about instaling packer or go right to their download page and then clone my packer-templates github repo. This has the packer template, and all the other artifacts needed to build a windows 2012 R2 VirtualBox based Vagrant box for windows. You can study this template and its supporting files to discover what all is involved.

For the 7 other folks out there that use Hyper-V to consume their devops tool artifacts, I recently blogged how to create a Hyper-V vagrant .box file from a Virtualbox hard disk (.vdi or vmdk). This post will focus of creating the VirtualBox box file, but you can read my earlier post to easily turn it into a Hyper-V box.

In short, Packer is a tool that assists in the automation of machine images. Many are familiar with Vagrant, made by the same outfit - Hashicorp - which has become an extremely popular platform for creating VMs. Making the spinning up of VMs easy to do and easy to share has been huge. But there has remained a somewhat uncharted frontier - automating the creation of the images that make up the VM.

So many of today's automation tooling focuses on bringing a machine from bare OS to a known desired state. However there is still the challenge of obtaining a bare OS and perhaps one that is not so "bare". Rather than spending so many cycles building the base OS image up to desired state on each VM creation, why not just do this once and bake it into the base image?...oh wait...we used to do that and it sucked.

Just like Vagrant makes building a VM a source controlled artifact, Packer does the same for VM templates and like Vagrant, its built on a plugin architecture allowing for the creation of just about all the common formats including containers.

Installing packer is super simple. Its just a collection of .exe files on windows and regardless of platform, its just an archive that needs to be extracted and then you simply add the extraction target to your path. If you are on Windows, do yourself a favor and install using Chocolatey.

At the core of creating images using Packer is the packer template file. This is a single json file that is usually rather small. It orchestrates the entire image creation process which has three primary components:

First you will notice the template includes a builder and a post-processor as mentioned above. It does not use a provisioner. Those are optional and we'll be doing most of our "provisioning" in the builder. I explain more about why later. Note that one can include multiple builders, provisioners, and post-processors. This one is pretty simple but you can find lots of more complex examples online.

Many do not know that you can obtain free and fully functioning versions of all the latest versions of windows from Microsoft. These are "evaluation" copies and only last 180 days. However, if you only plan to use the images for testing purposes like I do, that should be just fine.

In a perfect world I would have the windows install process enable winrm early on in my setup. This would result in a machine restart and then invoke provisioners that would perform all of my image bootstrap scripts. However, there are problems with that sequence on windows and the primary culprit is windows updates. I want to have all critical updates installed ASAP. However, windows updates cannot be easily run via a remote session which the provisioners do and once they complete, you will want to reboot the box which can cause the provisioners to fail.

Instead, I install all updates during the initial boot process. This allows me to freely reboot the machine as many times as I need since packer is just waiting for winrm and will not touch the box until that is available so I make sure not to enable winrm until the very end of my bootstrap scripts.

Since we are feeding virtualbox an install iso, if we did nothing else, it would prompt the user for all of the typical windows setup options like locale, admin password, disk partition, etc. Obviously this is all meant to be scripted and unattended and that would just hang the install. This is what answer files are for. Windows uses answer files to automate the the setup process. There are all sorts of options one can provide to customize this process.

My answer file is located in my repo here. Note that it s named AutoUnattend.xml and added to the floppy drive of the booted machine. Windows will load any file named AutoUnattend.xml in the floppy drive and use that file as the answer file. I am not going to go through every line here but do know there are additional options beyond what I have that one can specify. I will cover some of the more important parts.

This creates the administrator user vagrant with the password vagrant. This is the default vgrant username and password so setting up this admin user will make vagrant box setups easier. This also allows the initial boot to auto logon as this user instead of prompting.

You can specify multiple SynchronousCommand elements containing commands that should be run when the user very first logs in. I find it easier to read this already difficult to read file by just specifying one powershell file to run and then I'll have that file orchestrate the entire bootstrapping.

In short, this customizes the image in such a way that will make it far less likely to cause you to kill yourself or others while actually using the image. So you are totally gonna want to include this.

This downloads the latest version of boxstarter and installs the boxstarter powershell modules and finally installs package.ps1 via a boxstarter install run. You can visit boxstarter.org for more information regarding all the details of what boxstarter does. The key features is that it can run a powershell script, and handle machine reboots by making sure the user is automatically logged back in and that the script (package.ps1 here) is restarted.

c80f0f1006