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just wondering if it is possible to copy a VirtualBox VDI file (which i have KUBUNTU setup) to a bootable SD, so that i can just boot from the SD - looking at setting up another laptop with KUBUNTU, so figure it would be better to use the image i already have a number of things setup on.

EDIT: The VirtualBox is hosted on a Win10 laptop.

Any suggestions appreciated

Smac
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  • I use a Windows 10 VDI file located on a Ubuntu bootable USB to run Autocad. If VBox is installed on the HDD a VDI file on USB boots just like on HDD but is a little slower. – C.S.Cameron Oct 02 '19 at 16:17
  • https://askubuntu.com/questions/1016892/trying-to-set-up-virtualbox-with-live-persistent-usb-made-using-mkusb – C.S.Cameron Oct 02 '19 at 16:30
  • Or dd to bootable USB: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1904557 – C.S.Cameron Oct 02 '19 at 16:44

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It is possible to convert a VirtualBox VDI disk to an image file which can then be put onto a disk partition. There may be further steps required to make this bootable, though it may just work.

To convert the VDI file:

vboxmanage clonehd YourVMDisk.vdi RawVMDisk.img --output=raw

This will result in a .img file which can be written to a block device partition. You can use a tool such as Clonezilla for this, or something more low-level and potentially destructive such as dd.

I'm not sure whether you mean to write your disk image to and SD card or an SSD, both can be made bootable, though there are sometimes BIOS related difficulties around consistently assigning a device name to an SD card.

Arronical
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