P2V: Hassles Cloning a Linux Installation as a Virtual Machine

After some reading around, I settled on these tools to get the job done:

• A Knoppix boot disc
• An 8Gb USB pen drive
• VirtualBox
• dd, and fdisk

All free to use, all robust.

I took a look at my partition table on my physical Ubuntu box:

$ fdisk -l /dev/hda
Disk /dev/hda: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12161 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1               1         522     4192933+  83  Linux

Next, I copied the contents of hda1 to my pen drive:

$ dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/media/usb/hda1.raw bs=4096

I also copied the MBR:

$ dd if=/dev/hda of=/media/usb/mbr.raw bs=512 count=1

Back to my host computer and my fresh VirtualBox VM. I booted the VM using Knoppix, and then created the same partition layout (using fdisk expert mode to change the number of heads and sectors to match). I rebooted for good measure.

After booting again in Knoppix I copied first the hda1 into place:

$ dd if=/media/usb/hda1.raw of=/dev/hda1 bs=4096

Then I copied the MBR:

$ dd if=/media/usb/mbr.raw of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

I rebooted, and my cloned system wouldn't start. Restarting with Knoppix, I confirmed that I have the following problem:

$ sudo mount /dev/hda1 ~/temp
mount: /dev/hda1: can't read superblock

Now, I've tried this a number of different ways: without the mbr writing step, without tweaking the heads and sectors to match, with a partition larger than the original one - all to no avail.

I'm not finding other people with this same problem. Does anyone have any ideas?