Knoppix Tricks: Copy VM Image File with dd over ssh

For the most part, I am very happy with Sun's xVM VirtualBox, now at version 2.0.4.

However, one nagging problem for me persists.  Although VirtualBox does support USB 2.0 (VMware 1.07 does not), for some unknown reason it refuses to recognize a USB connection between my Nokia N95 and the Nokia PC Suite software.  After spending much time on trying to get it to work, I gave up and turned to VMware.  Among other things, Nokia PC Suite allows one to update the N95's firmware, and my objective here is to update to the newest version 30.0.015.

VMware Server 2.0 is a huge install, is a web UI, and based on my beta testing is quite processor-intensive for my purposes.  I have found the 32-bit version 1.0.7 to be quite nimble and I know that the USB 1.0 connection works with Nokia PC Suite.  It took about 10 minutes to download the rpm, install and create a blank 10G Windows XP ntfs partition.

What I don't relish is having to do the entire Windows install over again, and so decided to break out Knoppix to copy the VirtualBox Windows partition image to a file and then move it into VMware to the prepped empty ntfs partition.

How, pray tell?  The below steps were taken running on openSUSE Linux x86_64 11.0:

1) Download a copy of the Knoppix DVD iso.  You don't have to burn it to a DVD.
2) In VirtualBox, go into Settings and set the CD-ROM to mount the Knoppix iso file.
3) Start your VirtualBox Windows XP and your VM should boot directly into Knoppix KDE.
4) On the Desktop, right-click on the harddrive hda1 (or sda1) and select 'Mount'
5) Open a terminal window and su to root
6) In VMware, go into Settings and set the CD-ROM to mount the Knoppix iso file.
7) Start your VMware Windows XP and your VM should boot directly into Knoppix KDE.
8) On the Desktop, right-click and mount the harddrive hda1 with Read/Write access
9) Go to the KDE kicker menu and select KNOPPIX->Services->start sshd server
10) Open a terminal window and su into root, change the root password to 'pass'
(Knoppix doesn't have a root password a startup and we need root access via ssh)
11) Return to the VirtualBox terminal window root prompt and type:

dd if=/dev/hda bs=15M conv=sync,noerror | ssh -o TCPKeepAlive=yes \ root@vmware_host_ip  "dd of=/dev/hda"

Now go get a cup of coffee and wait. 

The above dd command streams a copy over ssh to the destination VMware ntfs partition in 15M blocksize chunks, which speeds up the process considerably.  For a 10gig partition it took about 35 minutes.  The 'TCPKeepAlive=yes' keeps the sshd server from dropping the ssh client connection if there is any sort of excessive timeout interval.

Once the image copy is complete, your terminal window will return to another prompt with the results of your dd copy.  Mine shown here:

---

#dd if=nt_backup bs=15M conv=sync,noerror | ssh -o TCPKeepAlive=yes \ 
root@192.168.114.128 "dd of=/dev/hda"

The authenticity of host '192.168.114.128 (192.168.114.128)' can't be established.

RSA key fingerprint is 23:d6:0e:b7:7b:23:47:9f:f6:45:a6:cc:5b:f1:d4:b1.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added '192.168.114.128' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.

20971520+0 records in
20971520+0 records out
10737418240 bytes (11 GB) copied
20969319+4402 records in
20971520+0 records out
10737418240 bytes (11 GB) copied

Password:
#                        

---

This was well worth the effort as it reduced the time to install windows by a couple of hours. 

Keep in mind, all of the above assumes you own a legitimate copy of Windows and that you are using only one instance at any given time.  It wouldn't be good to willy-nilly copy your image file around and Microsoft does check the instance and force a registration process at startup.

So, that's how it's done.  Knoppix once again comes through!

--Dietrich