[Cialug] virtualbox

[Dave Hala Jr]

I've got virtualbox 3.1.4 setup and running on a centos 5.x machine. I
want to run an existing rhel 3 server as a vm on the centos box.

I booted into single user mode on the rhel 3 box, unmounted the drives,
dd'ed them and saved the image on a usb hard drive. At the moment I'm
running:

VBoxManage convertdd rhel3.img rhel3.vdi

with the following output:

Converting from raw image file="rhel3.img" to file="rhel3.vdi"...
Creating dynamic image with size 320071884800 bytes (305245MB)...

The original dd image was about was about 320gb. I'm guessing that my
conversion is going to be that big. On the original rhel 3 box, the
amount of actual drive space that was used was about 40gb.  Is there
someway that I can make a new vdi, that is closer to the 40gb size?

It seems kinda crazy for me to need 640gb to make a vm image of an
existing server.

 :) Dave