Virtual disk, vhdx, vhd - is it nothing but a dd dump?

[David Christensen]

On 2020-09-20 00:54, Christoph Kukulies wrote:
> Sorry for being a bit off topic, but since it refers virtualization an FreeBSD has VirtualBox, I’m wondering,
> whether a so called vhd or vhdx file, which can be produced with virtualization tools like  disk2vhd, might be nothing but a raw dump
> of the disk.
> 
> Reason behind: I would like to virtualize an HP notebook (an HP11-e-170eg). Several trials failed (Parallels cloning over network,
> Hyper-V, p2v Vcenter Converter).
> 
> Now I thought of at least securing the hard drive once using
> 
> dd if=/dev/sd0 of=dump
> 
> from a booted FreeBSD stick to an external USB3.0 large disk.
> 
> Question, whether the dump obtaind that way, can be used as a virtualization medium.
> 
> —
> Christoph

https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=virtualbox%20raw%20vdi%20convert

https://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2012/04/29/virtualbox-convert-raw-image-to-vdi-and-otherwise/


David