Adventures in Virtual Machines...

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Lizard1977

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Topic # 123301 2-Jul-2013 21:06

I've set up my very first virtual machine, to test an idea I had.

My wife's 3-year old laptop, which came with Photoshop installed, is no longer being used. She's a little dismayed to be losing photoshop, so I had the idea of cloning the laptop's HDD and mounting it as the boot drive in a virtual machine. Here new Ivy Bridge computer would, I figured, be powerful enough to emulate her old laptop and hopefully run photoshop from a cloned image of her old computer as a virtual machine on here new computer. My theory was that it a cloned image could be used as the boot disk, and then all the programs installed on the hard disk clone would be useable.

I've managed to clone the disk, but using Virtual Box I couldn't see an easy way to mount the physical hard disk that I had used for the clone. I did see that I could specify a disk image, so I used the same program (Macrium Reflect) to make a disk image instead. This didn't seem to be in the right format for Virtual Box, so I used VBoxmanage convertfromraw in the command line to convert the disc image to a .vdi file. I was then able to load the new .vdi file into the virtual machine's settings, but when I started the virtual machine, it failed to boot.

Which isn't really a surprise. This is the first time I've ever used a virtual machine, and there are probably plenty of things I've done wrong. It may not even be possible to do what I'm trying to do. But I figured if I post it here, someone who knows about virtual machines might be able to suggest something to try, or just let me know that I'm wasting my time. Either would be fine by me. :)

mentalinc

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Reply # 848419 2-Jul-2013 21:30

What are you trying to achieve?

http://www.magicaljellybean.com/keyfinder/

That should show you the cd key used for installing photoshop.
Install photoshop on the new pc.

Copy the files from the old hard drive to new pc....

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robjg63

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Reply # 848422 2-Jul-2013 21:43

You have to use some tools to do a p2v (physical to virtual) disk image that you can then use in the virtual machine.

I have used the sysinternals disk2vhd tools (there are restrictions on image size etc). This only works on the MS virtual machine though. The problems lie in the fact the image has to change the drivers etc for the virtual hardware - so its a bit fiddly to get it to boot usually - well the first time or so - if you are lucky the virtual machine will boot enough to realise that the hardware has changed and want to install new drivers etc. It actually worked quite well.

If your source machine in win 7 there is quite a good tutorial here for virtualbox:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UFmoqJsQPO7p98Bv743xNsIF6BsdZruiJFkd3cqlb7A/edit?pli=1

Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself - A. H. Weiler

Lizard1977

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Reply # 848424 2-Jul-2013 21:50

I did think about the magical jellybean idea, but Photoshop was bundled as part of the windows installation. Even if I did retrieve the license key, I'd still need the installation files. Simply copying the program files from the laptop to the computer wouldn't work, would it?

Ragnor

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Reply # 849241 4-Jul-2013 13:28

For Physical to Virtual you generally need a converter to make changes to what hardware/drivers windows is using so that the resulting image is "hardware indepedant" sort of and will work in the VM software.

I've had better luck with VMWare converter and running on the VM on WMWare Player (both of which are free, just need to register on their website to download) than the open source options for older physical windows installs.

wellygary

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Reply # 849258 4-Jul-2013 13:53

Ragnor: For Physical to Virtual you generally need a converter to make changes to what hardware/drivers windows is using so that the resulting image is "hardware indepedant" sort of and will work in the VM software.

I've had better luck with VMWare converter and running on the VM on WMWare Player (both of which are free, just need to register on their website to download) than the open source options for older physical windows installs.

+1

Windows gets really snippy when you significantly change the hardware on it, you might even need
re-authorise windows at some point to,

wellygary

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Reply # 849259 4-Jul-2013 13:53

Ragnor: For Physical to Virtual you generally need a converter to make changes to what hardware/drivers windows is using so that the resulting image is "hardware indepedant" sort of and will work in the VM software.

I've had better luck with VMWare converter and running on the VM on WMWare Player (both of which are free, just need to register on their website to download) than the open source options for older physical windows installs.

+1

Windows gets really snippy when you significantly change the hardware on it, you might even need
re-authorise windows at some point to,

jaymz

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Reply # 868634 30-Jul-2013 15:40

Lizard1977: I've set up my very first virtual machine, to test an idea I had.

My wife's 3-year old laptop, which came with Photoshop installed, is no longer being used. She's a little dismayed to be losing photoshop, so I had the idea of cloning the laptop's HDD and mounting it as the boot drive in a virtual machine. Here new Ivy Bridge computer would, I figured, be powerful enough to emulate her old laptop and hopefully run photoshop from a cloned image of her old computer as a virtual machine on here new computer. My theory was that it a cloned image could be used as the boot disk, and then all the programs installed on the hard disk clone would be useable.

I've managed to clone the disk, but using Virtual Box I couldn't see an easy way to mount the physical hard disk that I had used for the clone. I did see that I could specify a disk image, so I used the same program (Macrium Reflect) to make a disk image instead. This didn't seem to be in the right format for Virtual Box, so I used VBoxmanage convertfromraw in the command line to convert the disc image to a .vdi file. I was then able to load the new .vdi file into the virtual machine's settings, but when I started the virtual machine, it failed to boot.

Which isn't really a surprise. This is the first time I've ever used a virtual machine, and there are probably plenty of things I've done wrong. It may not even be possible to do what I'm trying to do. But I figured if I post it here, someone who knows about virtual machines might be able to suggest something to try, or just let me know that I'm wasting my time. Either would be fine by me. :)

What is the version of Photoshop? you could always download a copy of the software and use the license to license it DEPENDING on if it was an OEM copy of Photoshop or not.

If it was OEM, then you are violating the license agreement for Photoshop, not to mention Windows by running it in a VM (Virtual Machine) on different hardware.

Regs

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Reply # 868700 30-Jul-2013 16:45

if you're running Windows 8 then Hyper-V is baked in to the OS and can do cool thing like publish the app (so you don't need to see the OS underneath running in a window).

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