OSS P2V 4 free via G4U
UPDATE: Hey folks, if you find this article useful and you haven’t yet bought Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion then do me a solid and please use one of the Amazon affiliate links below.
Thanks, James.
Now back to your article…
G4U or “ghost for unix” is a open-source lightweight NetBSD-based bootable floppy/ISO that enables a disk to be cloned at the raw byte level. Thus it will work with any operating system as it is independent of the filesystem used. As a consequence, the images it creates are very large despite a degree of compression. So how can you use G4U to take a Windows XP installation from its physical host to a virtual one running on Mac OS X?
The Process
Here’s my Dell D600 laptop running Windows XP, cheesy Wipeout wallpaper and all.
Next, I connected the D600 to my MacBook via a cross-over Ethernet cable. The MacBook’s SFTP file server was enabled and I booted the D600 into G4U (the ISO easily fits onto a CD or even a floppy).
The ‘uploaddisk’ command is used to copy the entire contents of the hard drive to the SFTP server. I deleted all unnecessary files from the D600 and ran a tool to write zeroes to all empty sectors on the hard drive. The image took a couple of hours to upload and ended up being around 10Gb in size.
I created a new VM in Parallels with a hard drive size exactly the same as the D600 it would be replacing. Other than that I used the defaults provided by Parallels for an XP VM. Here it is booting the G4U ISO itself…
Here is the main menu of G4U. The ’slurpdisk’ command connects to the SFTP server, downloads the image and expands it onto the local disk, in this case a ‘virtual hard drive’ provided by Parallels.
slurpdisk ran significantly faster than uploaddisk but it still took some time to complete. As you can see in this screenshot it took about one and a quarter hours to transfer the image using the virtual network adapter.
Once slurpdisk finished its job, I detached the G4U ISO and attached a Windows XP Professional SP 2 installation CD ISO to the VM’s virtual CD-ROM. It is very important to select the ‘To set up Windows XP now…’ option here (ENTER) rather than going to the Recovery Console. The Recovery Console will not work in this case! To initiate the XP repair process you must press ENTER. Thanks to Kingfisher on the Parallels Forums for pointing this out.
On the next screen we are offered the opportunity to repair an existing installation of Windows XP. Be sure to press ‘R’, unless you want to go through the lengthy slurpdisk process again. Check out Michael Stevens’ page on the XP repair process for more help on this procedure.
The XP setup program copied the files it needed to repair the install off the CD…
… and rebooted into the XP graphical shell.
The repair process continued, although there were no helpful indications that a repair was taking place… you could be forgiven for thinking that the whole OS was being reinstalled and your applications and data were being kissed goodbye.
As part of the repair process it was necessary to enter the Windows XP product key and peform activation again. I’m not sure if this is a normal part of the XP repair process or as a result of significant changes to the ‘hardware’ that the XP installation was running on. Nonetheless activation worked fine.
Rebooting the XP VM one last time…
The XP image successfully boots, having been ported from a physical Dell laptop to a virtual Parallels VM under OS X! I ran a number of applications, looked in a couple of files and everything appeared to be in order.
I strongly recommend exhaustively checking that your own applications and documents have survived the process before completely relying upon the VM.
The Caveats
Having proven that it can be done I want to make two important points:
- Your Mileage May Vary! If you are undertaking this process, or recommending it to someone else, please be sure to thoroughly test that all your applications and data have been transplanted before erasing your old PC or giving it away!
- Honour Microsoft’s Licensing. You have now installed your license of XP on a new machine and should probably stop using it on the original host or at least check the terms of your license agreement with Microsoft.
The Conclusion
In the absence of an official P2V solution from Parallels this is a relatively easy and free way (apart from Parallels Desktop of course) to migrate your existing install of XP onto a brand new MacBook Pro, MacBook or Intel iMac/Mac mini and experience the goodness that is OS X with even less risk. So what are you waiting for? Hit up your Head of IT or Significant Other for approval to purchase a MacBook today!
Comments»
[…] Since Apple’s move to Intel architecture we have seen a few virtualization solutions for Mac OS X pop up; first from Parallels and most recently from VMware. This has made it easier for people to switch from Windows to Mac OS X knowing that they have a way to keep working with applications that do not have an OS X equivalent. At the same time though, I expect that many may resist simply because of the time needed to switch all applications from a Windows laptop to an Apple MacBook. So I got to wondering, what if there was a cheap way to go P2V from a laptop running XP to a Parallels Desktop XP virtual machine? Read on to find out how. […]
Thank you for all your good work on this. Your method is much more elegant (and faster) for transferring the disk image than mine was, and does not require an external disk. I had almost 10 times the data to transfer, but it appears that I could have used G4U and an external drive rather than the commercial product, and used an external disk rather than the network.
Thank you also for the great screen shots of the repair process.
you wrote:-
As part of the repair process it was necessary to enter the Windows XP product key and peform activation again. I’m not sure if this is a normal part of the XP repair process or as a result of significant changes to the ‘hardware’ that the
this is because Paralllels generatse a new MAC number for each VM
even if you clone an existing VM
Hugh W
I’ve moved the drive image to my Parallels disk, but when I run my Win Install disks (I had to slipstream it to SP2), The repair option never appears. I have two partitions on my PC and it asks me on which partition to install it. Installing deletes the existing version of XP.
Any idea? Thanks…
Nothing comes to mind I am afraid. You might want to take a look at the latest beta version of Parallels Transporter that now comes with Parallels Desktop (and I think will be free for existing Parallels Desktop users) as it is their own P2V solution and now obsoletes the approach I have documented here.
Great post and instructions, James. I’ve been trying to figure out good ways to migrate some various machines into a VM for a while and your writeup has led me down the path of solving the problem.
I had been looking around at the various VM solutions for one that can read a raw disk image (e.g. one that can be created with dd or the equivalent, such as uploaddisk). The key thing I was missing, of course, was that I don’t have to point the VM at that right away. I can bring up the VM and then write the disk image into the VMs disk.
Naturally, I read this and was feeling a bit silly about not thinking of that myself. Of course, now that I know about uploaddisk and slurpdisk, I’ll probably be using those, too, since they seem very convenient.
So thanks!!