There is a way in fact of doing this although it \*might* contravene your OEM license.
1) obtain and install Acronis 9.1 Workstation with Universal restore on your original physical machine.
2) Create a partition image of your Windows OS on an accessible disk using the Acronis product . A network disk or USB disk is fine for this purpose.
We will use THIS IMAGE and not the original CD when creating our VM as this will have all the Windows file structures intact with the necessary windows components, drivers / directories set up correctly in the acronis image (labelled xxxx.tib)
3) Create bootable recovery media from the Acronis product
4) Create an empty VM. Ensure the disk space is large enough to restore the partition image we created in step 2.
5) Set the Virtual Bios (press ESC when starting the VM) to boot from a CD
6) Boot your Recovery Acronis CD AND ENABLE UNIVERSAL RESTORE. Select an appropriate size for the partition restore if you want to alter the size of the restored partition and set the partition type to ACTIVE. You'll get these prompts from the Acronis restore menu -- it's extremely simple.
The restore program might ask you to re-boot during its processing and might possibly prompt you for Drivers if any really funny drivers are being used -- this occurs much more often when you are doing the reverse process -=-converting a Virtual Machine to a Real machine (V2P - Virtual to Physical).
This will essentially perform a P2V (Physical to Virtual) conversion for you.
If the image you created in step 2) is on a Network drive the restore option will have an option Computers Near Me. Expand this to access your network drive. The Acronis product has its own network drivers enabled and I haven't yet found a network card it doesn't work with.
USB disks will be shown as local drives although the disk letters might be different to when you booted Windows on your real / physical machine.
7) Boot up your new Windows VM --You might get asked for re-activation so what you say to M$ is your own business. Being an OEM version of Windows it \*might* just activate anyway.
Once you've booted up your new Windows VM install vmware tools and you are ready to go.
Another option although I haven't actually tried this is to set up the VM using a RAW disk.
If you want to go that route I suggest you try and get help from other members of these Forums who've used RAW disks.
I've found the Acronis 9.1 workstation product really good both for P2V and V2P conversions -- rarely if ever fails on a whole slew of different hardware provided you follow the instructions.
Note if you have a large 150 GB disk for example and you've got everything in one partition then the method I've described above will be a bit impracticable as you'll need a similar size partition on your target VM.
It usually makes much better sense to keep only your OS and some programs that need to be installed in the Windows partition in a separate partition and keep all your user data, music, email etc etc in separate partitions or Disks. That way a 12 GB Windows partition will probably be MORE than large enough for almost any set of applications.
Another advantage of separating the OS partition from the Data is that if you have to re-install your OS you don't lose or need to recover your own DATA.
Modern computers can easily tolerate the slight I/O degradation in splitting the OS from the data if it's on one disk, and the advantages more than make up for this anyway.
You might be able to do some re-partitioning on your Physical system before you start creating the VM.
Finally if you don't have enough disk space to create the Acronis Images you can burn direct to a DVD. Acronis has built in DVD burning facility - takes a bit longer of course.
However ensure that on restore the DVD is on a DIFFERENT drive to the drive you booted the recovery program from. I.E you'll need to ensure your VM is defined as having 2 DVD/CD drives.
You unfortunately can't dismount the "boot" drive and insert the DVD image. It works sometimes but not always so I'd avoid that option.
I suspect the size of restore and amount of RAM in the VM has something to do with this but it's easier and quicker to use Disks.
A 12 GB Windows partition on a typical machine takes around 25 mins for the restore so no big deal - and it's FAR quicker than a Windows install from scratch on to a VM anyway).
Cheers
-J
