TOPIC: DISK IMAGE
Converting QEMU disk images to VirtualBox images on Linux Mint 21
30th October 2022Recently, VirtualBox gained fuller support for Windows 11 and I successively set up a new Windows 11 virtual machine that, I hope, will supplant a Windows 10 counterpart in time. While the setup itself was streamlined, I ran into such stability issues that I set the new VM aside until a new version of VirtualBox got released. That has happened with the appearance of version 7.0.2, but Windows 11 remains prone to freezing on my Linux Mint machine. Thankfully, that now is much less frequent, yet the need for added stability remains outstanding.
While I was thinking about trying out VirtualBox 7.0.0, I remembered a QEMU machine that I had running Windows 11. Though QEMU proved more limited than VirtualBox when it came to having easy availability of functionality like moving data in and out of the virtual machine or support for sound, there was no problem with TPM support or system stability. Since it did contain some useful data, I wondered about converting its virtual hard disk to VirtualBox format, and it is easy to do. First, you need to install qemu-img and other utilities as follows:
sudo apt-get install qemu-utils
With that in place, executing a command like the following performs the required conversion. Here, the -O switch specifies the required file type of vdi in this case.
qemu-img convert -O vdi [virtual hard disk].qcow2 [virtual hard disk].vdi
While I have yet to mount it on the new VirtualBox Windows 11 virtual machine, it is good to have the old virtual hard disk available for doing so. The thought of using it as a boot drive in VirtualBox did enter my mind, but the required change of drivers and other incompatibilities dissuaded me from doing so.
Changing the UUID of a VirtualBox Virtual Disk Image in Linux
11th July 2021Recent experimentation centring around getting my hands on a test version of Windows 11 had me duplicating virtual machines and virtual disk images, though VirtualBox still is not ready for the next Windows version; it has no TPM capability at the moment. Nevertheless, I was able to get something after a fresh installation that removed whatever files were on the disk image. That meant that I needed to mount the old version to get at those files again.
While renaming partially helped with this, what I really needed to do was change the UUID, so VirtualBox would not report a collision between two disk images with the same UUID. To avoid this, the UUID of one of the disk images had to be changed and a command like the following was used to accomplish this:
VBoxManage internalcommands sethduuid [Virtual Disk Image Name].vdi
Because I was doing this on Linux Mint, I could call VBoxManage without need to tell the system where it was, as would be the case on Windows. Otherwise, it is the sethduuid portion that changes the UUID as required. Another way around this is to clone the VDI file using the following command, but I had not realised that at the time:
VBoxManage clonevdi [old virtual disk image].vdi [new virtual disk image].vdi
It appears that there can be more than one way to do things in VirtualBox at times, so the second way will remain on reference for the future.