Moving WIN7 VM

I tried to move my activated windows 7 Virtualbox VM without loosing my activation between opensuse 12.1 to a brandnew opensuse12.2 installation. The version of Virtualbox has changed too, to 4.2.4. The old vdi-file was mounted on

  1. /vdi with the filename win7.vdi

    This is important: So the *.vbox-file includes the correct pathes

  2. In suse12.2 I made mountpoints suse12.1 and windvdi and mounted the partitions as root
    		mount /dev/sda1 /suse12.1
    		mount /dev/sda5 /winvdi
    			
  3. Made a target directory in suse12.2 for the *.vdi (names must match!!)
    		mkdir /vdi
    			
  4. Now copy the win7.vdi file
    		cp /winvdi/win7.vdi /vdi
    			
    The harddisk should be busy for a time (on my ssd's it takes 50 seconds for 10 GB). Check the owner!
  5. Copy the description files
    cp -r /suse12.1/[myhome]/VirtualBox VMs/win7 [myhome]/VirtualBox VMs/
    			
  6. Save the VirtualBox.xml (it includes a Machine-UUID)
    	cd [myhome]/.VirtualBox
    	cp VirtualBox.xml VirtualBox.xml.saved 
    			
  7. Now move the description-file
    cp /suse12.1/[myhome]/.VirtualBox/VirtualBox.xml ./
    			
  8. Start VirtualBox, start win7-VM and enjoy that activation had survived the locomotion

caveats

As I can see now, Virtualbox passes the host-processor to the guests. So I believe, if you use the same procedure between different PCs - it would fail. OK - this is scheduled for "the things to do"
Angsüsser Johann