Clone VDI tool

https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=22422

CloneVDI tool - Discussion & Support

by mpack » 15. Sep 2009, 23:13

Many Windows users dislike the fact that you currently have to use the Command Prompt to clone VDI files (*). Also, questions often arise related to VDI files such as "how do I increase the maximum size of a VDI?" or "how can I make my dynamic VDI file small again?". As a recent vacation project I decided to try to write a nice simple tool that provided a good answer to all of these questions. Hopefully I succeeded.

(*) [edit: VirtualBox v4.1 finally added GUI support for cloning]

Attached to this message is a zip file containing the software tool that I wrote, which I call "CloneVDI" (currently at version 2.10). Features as of this release include:

• Reads VDI,VHD,VMDK,Parallels HDD,RAW files and physical drives, writes VDI.
• A simple GUI Interface.
• A CLI interface too (for people who like that kind of thing!)
• Ability to compact (discard unused blocks from) the clone, with no need to run sdelete/zerofree first.
• Ability to enlarge the maximum size of a virtual disk, optionally enlarging the main partition too.
• Merge snapshot VDI chain into a single VDI (VHD and VMDK snapshot chains supported too).
• User choice to either keep the old UUID or generate a new one for the clone.
• Some useful diagnostics about the source VDI, such as the partition map and the internal fileystem.
• Better feedback while cloning: a progress bar and an estimated time to completion.
• It seems to be significantly faster than "VBoxManage clonehd".
• Open source.

To install, simply create a folder and unpack the zip contents into it. Optionally, you can create a shortcut to link your desktop to the CloneVDI.exe file in the target folder. The zip file includes release notes which hopefully provides answers to all of your questions.

Note that this tool is not simply a GUI front end for VBoxManage. Instead it uses my own code to read and write VDI files (and other formats), and therefore works in a rather different way, with different features and capabilities.

Enjoy. Feel free to ask any questions here, but read the release notes first.

[ Edit: 12th Sep 2012. CloneVDI attachment updated to v2.10. Bugfixes plus support for VMDK and VHD snapshots. ]