Converting Metasploitable for Virtualbox

So this is not a typical Back Track post, but one on converting the Metasploitable VMware image to one that will work with Virtualbox. There are other ways of converting .vmdk files to .vdi ones but none of them seemed to work for me. This was all done on an Ubuntu machine. You could do the same on others though. If you don't have or know about metasploitable check the above link. So grab a copy here and then extract the zip archive.

Go to a shell and then grab qemu, this is another virtualization product but we don't care about it, once we are done you can remove it.

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amael@ubuntudork:~$ sudo aptitude install qemu
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Once this is done run the following commands.
NOTE: This may take some time to complete.

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amael@ubuntudork:/tmp/Metasploitable$ qemu-img convert /tmp/Metasploitable/metasploitable.vmdk metasploitable.bin
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This will convert the .vmdk to a binary then we will convert the .bin to a Virtualbox .vdi file.

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amael@ubuntudork:/tmp/Metasploitable$ VBoxManage convertdd metasploitable.bin metasploitable.vdi

Sun VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.0.14
(C) 2005-2010 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Converting from raw image file="Metasploitable.bin" to file="Metasploitable.vdi"...
Creating dynamic image with size 8589934592 bytes (8192MB)...
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Once this is finished you are now ready to use Metasploitable in Virtualbox.

So go ahead and set up a new machine. You can find many guides on doing this on the net.
But basically you just need to point Virtualbox to the newly created Metasploitable.vdi file.

From Virtual Box Metasploitable

You may want to edit some of the settings. For my setup I had to ensure that the Extended Features Enable PAE/NX box was checked. This is located under Settings>System>Processor. The first time I booted without this it did not work.

From Virtual Box Metasploitable

It might also be a good idea to ensure that this machine is configured for "Host Only" networking so that it is not facing the internet.

So there you have it.

From Virtual Box Metasploitable

That's pretty much it. Have fun.