VirtualBox - a great way to keep your old PC image

I have an old Windows XP machine that the motherboard has failed on.  It has a lot of data and programs on it that I use from time to time (it was my primary PC for 6 years).  I have found that Oracle VirtualBox (from their purchase of Sun) can be very helpful in allowing me to have an image of my old machine running on my new machine as I transition.  This has greatly reduced the pain of loosing the old machine.

I put the XP disk in a USB carrier and plugged it into my Linux machine.  Using command like

cat /dev/sdg | VBoxManage convertfromraw stdin OutPutFile.vdi NUMBEROFBYTES

I managed to image the disk to a file on the linux machine. I then started VirtualBox and created a virtual machine using the disk image.

On startup the machine blue screened, just like windows does from time to time. Not to worry, I got my original XP CD and told virtualbox it was in the cd drive. Then on booting the virtual machine I did a windows repair. Windows now booted and after a couple of windows updates I have my machine back in a virtual environment.

A couple of things I found along the way -

The VirtualBox that is distributed with Linux is the Open Source Edition and does not have the extensions to use USB - download the executable from http://www.virtualbox.org - They even have a fedora repo file so you can keep it up to date with yum.

Follow the instructions on getting the kernel extensions built - you will have to do this each time you update you linux kernel.

I had problems where after installing the VirtualBox extensions I could not get shared folders to work, it kept saying they do not appear to be installed. It turns out the Kaspersky Internet Security was blocking the install - disable it and try again, magically the install works. After doing this and rebooting it is working fine.