First launch an EC2 instance with the desired AMI. Now we’ll need to enable root ssh access.

$ sudo perl -i -pe 's/#PermitRootLogin .*/PermitRootLogin without-password/' /etc/ssh/sshd_config$ sudo perl -i -pe 's/.*(ssh-rsa .*)/\1/' /root/.ssh/authorized_keys$ sudo /etc/init.d/sshd reload # optional command<br>(Thanks to Gurjeet Singh)Now we need to copy the running system to a local disk image:$ ssh -i ~/.ec2/your_key root@ec2-XX-XX-XX-X.compute-1.amazonaws.com 'dd if=/dev/xvda1 bs=1M | gzip' | gunzip | dd of=./ec2-image.raw    Now to prepare a filesystem on a new image file:$ dd if=/dev/zero of=vmdk-image.raw bs=1M count=10240 # create a 10gb image file$ losetup -fv vmdk-image.raw # mount as loopback device$ cfdisk /dev/loop0 # create a bootable partition, write, and quit$ losetup -fv -o 32256 vmdk-image.raw # mount the partition with an offset$ fdisk -l -u /dev/loop0 # get the size of the partition$ mkfs.ext4 -b 4096 /dev/loop1 $(((20971519 - 63)*512/4096)) # format using the END number<br>Now we need to copy everything from the EC2 image to the empty image:$ losetup -fv ec2-image.raw$ mkdir -p /mnt/loop/1 /mnt/loop/2 # create mount points$ mount -t ext4 /dev/loop1 /mnt/loop/1 # mount vmdk-image$ mount -t ext4 /dev/loop2 /mnt/loop/2 # mount ami-image$ cp -a /mnt/loop/2/* /mnt/loop/1/    Now install grub:$ cp /usr/lib/grub/x86_64-pc/stage* /mnt/loop/1/boot/grub/<br>Check /boot/grub/menu.lst and ensure everything is correct (you will probably need to use root (hd0,0) to make it work with grub).Now we can unmount the device (umount /dev/loop1) and convert the raw disk image to a vmdk image.$ qemu-img convert -f raw -O vmdk vmdk-image.raw final.vmdk<br>Now just create a VirtualBox VM with the vmdk image mounted as the primary boot device.Unfortunately at this point I could not get the Amazon Linux kernel to boot inside VirtualBox. I tried recompiling without Xen support, but still kept running into one problem or another. The only way that I was able to boot into a working system was to copy over my Ubuntu 11.10 kernel and initrd images. If anyone is able to make the Amazon Linux kernel run inside VirtualBox, please leave a comment here or on my ServerFault question.Did this post make sense to you? Then check out our technical job openings here. Cover photo by Mario Calvo