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I have Oracle VM VirtualBox running on Centos5.8.
I currently have two machines on it; one with Windows XP and IE6 and a second with Windows XP IE7.
I now wish to create a third running Windows XP IE8.
Instead of creating a new machine and reinstalling windows, is it possible to clone or copy one of the existing machines?
Yes. I am not completely familiar with VirtualBox, (I use VMware Player), but the concept is still the same. The easiest way to clone a virtual machine is to shut the vm down. Find where the file for that machine is (usually a .vmdk) and copy and paste it. You can then tell VirutalBox to open that copy.
The clone feature provided by VirtualBox is to provide a hot-clone, or clone the machine while it is running. Most products charge for this feature, but still allow a user to create a cold-copy with the machine off, using the procedure described above.
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If that doesn’t work, you can just copy the .vdi file(the hard drive) and attach it to a new VM as the primary HDD. I found this post in a forum.
“I’ve had success with copying the .vdi harddisk image with the command VBoxManage clonevdi ImageYouWantToCopy.vdi DestinationImage.vdi. Then just make a new VM that uses the new .vdi. It’s a bit cumbersome, but it seems to work fine.”
https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=674