How to copy a Win XP installation to a New virtual machine?

[fauzzo]

Hallo,

I have a working Win XP Pro virtual machine using 30 GB of disk space because I have selected to allocate all disk space during creation.

Now I would like to reduce the space wasted by this installation and allocate the space when needed only.

Is there any way to clone the partition and use it on a new VM where I would like to split disk into 2 GB files and not allocate all disk space?

I have tried to use Norton Ghost 9, I was able to create the disk image and restore it to the new machine but unfortunally the restered disk will not boot: I just get blue screens.

Thank you for any help!

[admin]

The most direct option would be to use vmware-vdiskmanager (or my GUI wrapper ) to convert the disk to a sparse/split virtual disk. You would then either replace the old virtual disk or create a new virtual machine using the new vmdk.

Another option is to use Converter - I think you can choose the output format. This is also useful if you want to change the size of the disk.