excluding hard drives when cloning a vm

[MatthiasMarx]

Hi,

I want to clone a VM that has several drives. The C: drive has the OS (W2008R2) and is fairly small, D:, E: and F: are large (TeraBytes) and contain the data. I only need the C: drive in the clone. Is there any way to exclude the other drives during the cloning process? I clicked through the wizard but it didn't give me an option.

Thank you,

Matthias

[DSTAVERT · Accepted solution]

I would use the VMware Standalone Converter where you do have a choice of which drives to clone.  http://vmware.com/go/converter

[MatthiasMarx]

Thank you - I'll give that a try.

Matthias

[mpverr]

Another option, assuming you can have a small amount of downtime, is to simply to shut down the VM, unpresent (do NOT delete) the virtual disks, then clone.  After you have one clone, re-add the disks (in the correct order of SCSI target ID) then you are all set. 

OR - if you want to get into the weeds of things, put a snapshot on the VM, then via command line, use vmkfstools to make a copy of the boot disk.