Yes, so I plan to try an emulate my host computer and the way the hard drive on it would be set up but instead to be safer, I thought of just installing Gentoo, not the Live CD image but actually by command line, to the Virtual Disk, take Clonezilla and clone the image and the burn it to my real hard drive. Can anyone see any problems with all this that I don't? It seems sane to me but I still have minor reservations if it would work...??

Thanks.

I don't think the system installed in the virtual machine will recognize the real hardware, unless it can detect and set on fly the real hardware plus you will need generic kernel.

Regards

I can't see advantages in doing this. May I ask for an explanation why you would first use the VM and then copy it over?

That is typically less of a problem for Linux than for Windows.

Yes, I disagree with the hesitations of the reply posts. If you setup Virtual Box with a VB image disk, and install a tar ball for 64 bit, not to mention partition the harddrive like I do to GUID, set all files systems exactly to same sector, etc the use an excellent clone too such as Clonezilla Im sure it can be done, and Clonezilla, a Linux distro, Im sure will inform you of potential problems.

I think Windows would just feed me to the wolves on the whole idea.

But Tux has my back....

It depends. On newer Windows systems (Vista/7) changing the underlying hardware is not really a problem anymore. There may be some minor annoyances, bust they can easily be fixed.

I still would like to know where you see the advantage of your approach. What do you want to achieve with this complicated installation method?

I'm sorry I did not touch on the advantages before, but simply this is a huge deal as I just bought an awesome laptop running the Intel i5 processor and I wanted to install Gentoo to really tweak and customize the system around the hardware I have. The problem is that twice now, once on my old computer and once on the laptop, I have gotten hung up at the very end of my install, and I am doing complete command line install, not Live image, so in the case of the hangups, for one Gentoo is real time with changes or partitions and such and so I did not even know where to backtrack to fix anything but just it be easier to try the install again. But at that point, first I would have to load any distro I happen to find laying around, which takes time then install it and get things back to normal first as I do not mess around with hardware, especially laptops and boot-loading as I do know what I am doing and want to be thorough and learn from experiences as I go. If what I am asking about here is true and can be done, that's major as it eliminates the risk of this happening completely in an install gone bad, and saves a lot of time later. That's why I am interested.

Thank you for actually wanting to understand my position in this as on a personal level, it really is something that could be beneficial in a couple ways in my Linux experiences and day to day computing.

If you clone a system (real or virtual makes no difference) it generally can be moved. Be warned that sometimes it fails quite badly.

I for the life of me can't seem to clone a Fedora to what is supposed to be an exact same model computer. Rule is that you always use installer. It is the only tested means to install. Things that installers do tend to get hidden in the process.

Gentoo is such a specialized distro that you really should allow it to properly install to the target system.