Willing wheels

From .vhd to .vdi

When I tried to run xp vhd, provided from microsoft, to test websites on multiple versions of IE (cf. How to test your website on IE6 & IE7 thanks to virtualization), it occurs that each .vhd file has been generated with the same UUID, preventing them from being loaded at the same time in VirtualBox (v2.2).

Although VirtualBox can now transparently handle .vhd natively, I chose to convert these .vhd files into .vdi format so that they have each a unique uuid and can be loaded at the same time in VirtualBox.

Below are the steps:

To do this, I proceeded as follow:

1. install qemu package (sudo apt-get install qemu)
2. convert .vhd file: qemu-img convert -O raw myfile.vhd myfile.bin
3. once the file has been converted, we convert it to .vdi format using VBoxManage: VBoxManage convertfromraw myfile.bin myfile.vdi –variant standard
   note1: “variant” is specified to ensure we have an expandable vdi file (.bin file is 17Gb, .vdi file will be only 1.5Gb)
   note2: in previous version, “convertfromraw” command was called “convertdd”

That’s it.

Simply load your vdi file within VirtualBox, do it for all three xp .vhd files and you can now use all these VM more easily.

sources

• http://morecowbell.net.au/2009/03/internet-explorer-application-compatibility-vpc-images-under-virtualbox/
• http://www.qc4blog.com/?p=84 previous post on same topic