I hoped I could avoid situations like this, but unfortunately it did came on my path and it really was dead easy..

In this process I describe the conversion of the VHD (Virtual Harddisk Drive) from Virtual PC to Virtualbox (VDI). This was enough for me, just make a blank Windows machine and add the new (yet to produce) VDI file.

To do this, I proceeded as follow:

1. install qemu package (sudo apt-get install qemu)
2. convert .vhd file: qemu-img convert -O raw myfile.vhd myfile.bin
3. once the file has been converted, we convert it to .vdi format using VBoxManage: VBoxManage convertfromraw myfile.bin myfile.vdi –variant standard
   note1: “variant” is specified to ensure we have an expandable vdi file (.bin file is 17Gb, .vdi file will be only 1.5Gb)
   note2: in previous version, “convertfromraw” command was called “convertdd”

Simple as that. Thanks to Willing Wheels for these instructions, worked perfect.

Don’t forget to reactive Windows as needed, since Windows Licensing works hardware based.