Restoring a Clonezilla Image using VirtualBox

Ubuntu 10.04 has been out for a few months, and I'm still on 09.10. I have had some success in the past upgrading, but I still prefer doing fresh installs. I guess it comes from my windows days, when an occasional fresh install was good for the computer soul. However, this time I'm also starting a new project at work doing .net instead of java, and I really wanted the ability to "come back" to my old setup. Basically, I wanted to convert my host machine to a virtual one or what's called P2V (Physical to Virtual). I tried VMware Converter but didn't get very far. With some advice from several co-workers though, I did come up with a method that did work and it was fairly easy.

The basic steps are:

• Use Clonezilla to Save a Disk Image to a external USB drive. This essentially clones my host machine, where I can restore it later. My hard drive is around 120GB, so I put the image on my 500GB external USB drive. This took about 1.5 hours.
• Create a new virtual machine on another external USB drive. The nice thing about using Clonezilla, is for this step you can use VMware or VirtualBox. I used VirtualBox. Obviously, you can't create the virtual machine on your laptop because you don't have enough space. And you can't use the same USB drive because when restoring, Clonezilla needs it to be unmounted. So instead I used another external USB drive.
• Start the new virtual machine and boot up Clonezilla to begin restoring the image. You need to change the mode because the default view doesn't work very well when restoring. So at the Clonezilla menu, choose "Other modes of Clonezilla live". Then choose "Clonezilla live (Safe graphic settings, vga=normal)".
• When you get to the point where Clonezilla needs to point to the external USB drive that contains the Clonezilla image, remember to enable the USB drive in VirtualBox. To do this, go to the Devices menu option in your virtual machine and select USB Devices and check the appropriate USB drive. Restoring my 120GB image took about 24 hours so make sure to do it when you have time.
• Once Clonezilla has finished restoring the image your ready to poweroff the virtual machine, remove the clonezilla CD, and restart.

I still had a few adjustments to make in order to get it to work. When I first started my virtual machine, it complained about not having PAE (Physical Address Extension) enabled. I enabled PAE in ubuntu about a month ago so I could use all 4GB of RAM. Fixing it was easy. Under your machines settings go to System and click on the Processor tab. Check the "Enable PAE/NX" checkbox and restart.

Once it booted up, it complained about my graphics configuration. I tried selecting "Reconfigure Graphics", but that didn't work. Instead I was able to get passed it by selecting "Run in low graphics for one session". This allowed me to finish booting where I installed the virtualbox guest additions which seemed to solve the graphics issue.

That is all there is to it. It was all rather easy. Now I can install Ubuntu 10.04 and have the ability to go back to my previous development environment. I could also see lots of different use cases for this. Combined with the ability to clone virtual machines, all your virtual needs are met.