CREATING AN IMAGE FROM A VIRTUAL MACHINE

While you are not likely to need to create an image from a virtual machine professionally, you might wish to do so if you are practicing and/or following along with some of the examples from this book. If all you need is a raw image, you can use the tools that come with VirtualBox in order to create a raw image.

One downside of using the VirtualBox tools is that you won’t get the hashes dcfldd provides. Another downside is that you won’t get to practice using the tools you need for imaging a physical drive. The command to create the image from a Linux host is vboxmanage clonehd

—format RAW.

If you are hosting your virtual machine on Linux, you can still use the standard tools such as dcfldd. The reason that this works is that Linux is smart enough to treat this virtual image file like a real device. This can be verified by running the command fdisk . The results of running this command against a virtual machine hard drive are shown in Figure 4.3.

FIGURE 4.3

Results of running fdisk against a virtual machine image.