Daniel Roe
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Poster: Daniel Roe @ Wed May 26, 2010 10:21 am
So I installed VirtualBox a few days ago and loved it so much I wanted to put it on my Macbook (and since it's FREE, you can do it without licensing issues unlike some other pieces of software..... f$#@ you Macworld). However, I have no desire to reinstall/reconfigure Windows. Therefore I decided to just transfer VirtualBox' configuration from one Mac to another as closely as possible. This method takes about 1 minute (plus however long it takes to transfer your hard drive image).
 I tried transferring the "~/Library/VirtualBox" folder over directly, and that didn't work (seems to be hardware-specific), so I tried creating a new machine and importing the hard drive image, that works fine. By the way, if you have Windows installed on this image, the following is probably illegal (unless you're licensed properly):
1) Go into ~/Library/VirtualBox/ on the computer with the existing installation
2) Transfer the "HardDisks" folder to the new mac in the same relative location (~/Library/VirtualBox), leaving out everything else in the VirtualBox folder
3) [this step could have been done already, doesn't matter] Install VirtualBox on the destination machine
4) Create a new virtual machine
5) Go through the dialogs selecting RAM allocation, et al, (it doesn't matter what you select as far as RAM or even machine name) and when it comes to "Virtual Hard Disk," Select "Use existing hard disk"
5) Select the .vdi file you transfered from your previous mac (~/Library/VirtualBox/HardDisks/*****.vdi) by hitting the little FOLDER BUTTON  (it will NOT show up under that drop-down menu automatically).
Other websites were talking about using some sort of "clone machine" command, but this seems to work fine (and yes, you can just duplicate the "vdi" to clone a virtual machine on the same computer). The other machine related files do not seem to be transferable, so transferring snapshots and other settings would seem impossible (at least via this method).
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