Converting a Virtual PC .vhd to a Virtual Box .vdi

February 04, 2009

I had some Virtual PC images in .vhd that I wanted to convert to Virtual Box .vdi files. After some tracing through a few Google searches and some experimentation of my own, the best way seems to be:

$ qemu-img convert -O raw start.vhd intermediate.bin
$ vboxmanage convertdd intermediate.bin final.vdi
$ vboxmanage modifyvdi final.vdi compact

Once you have the .vdi, I found that I had to enable APIC and IO-APIC to avoid a blue screen of death in my windows Virtual PC images on startup.