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. :)