Converting an OS from a dead PC

[Jim1867]

Good afternoon all,

I have a situation where I need to clone a hard drive with it's OS in to a virtual machine.

I've seen "VMware vCentre Converter" mentioned as the cloning software, however I am cloning from a usb dock, not the computers hard drive itself.

Is there another program to use for this application?

Thank you

Jim

[vijayrana968]

What is the format of disk you have saved on USB dock. you have single file ?

[Jim1867]

It's a Windows OS, XP or 98 I'm unsure as I haven't booted it.

[vijayrana968]

I guess you just have copied data as files/folders same as they were from existing PC. Is it ?

[Jim1867]

I have not copied anything yet.

I would like to convert the hard drive to a VM so it brings across all settings etc, rather than creating a VM and copying the contents across.

[vijayrana968]

I got your point, that's why I am asking the format of existing hard disk you have on USB. Is t .vmdk or .vhd etc !

[wila]

Hi Jim,

If you extract the disk from the laptop and have put that in a USB enclosure.

Then wanting to run that into a VM, my guess the way to do so is by using the VMware Workstation feature to connect directly to the disk (raw disk mappings)

As you are running on VMware Player that feature is not available. In such a case you would still need to image the disk and eventually put that image into a virtual machine that has been setup with empty virtual disks of the correct size. Disk imaging software such as Norton Ghost, Linux dd, or similar would work.

While that might work, you're very likely to bump into windows activation issues.

If the disk comes from a laptop and was an OEM licensed version of Windows then you also have a licensing issue as an OEM OS dies along with the hardware it was licensed with.

--

Wil

[Jim1867]

Apologies, I am not very savvy when it comes to OS' and the labeling etc...

I do not know how to find out? Please let me know.

Jim