Make a VM from a Hard Drive?

[jsa]

I've got a few hard drives from long-gone machines. Drives are good, and have licensed OSes on

them, Win98, Win2k, XP, etc. I would like to occasionally run these old installations as VMs.

I can put these drives in a USB/Firewire external enclosure (it has both interfaces, and I can use one or the other).

I want to import them to Virtual machines to run under Vmware Workstation, or use the disk

in the external enclosure directly. I'm not too fussy about which method I end up with.

I have Vmware Workstation 6.0.2 (hosted on Vista Business Ultimate).

I have Vmware Converter.

But reading the manual for VMware Converter seems to suggest I have no way to import these disks

to VMs unless I build real hardware around the disks. Am I wrong? This seems like a major drawback of

Converter.

So I tried just creating a VM and telling it to use the USB or Firewire drive. No luck.

It will at least attempt to boot on firewire, but then hangs with a dialog box where nothing but the cancel option

works.

Is there a way to use a physical disk as a VM when it is on one of these interfaces, or

do I have to add an ide controller to my host machine and move the disk inside? (highly undesireable).

Failing that, how can I clone the drive into a Virtual Machine without building a complete

computer around it?

[Liz]

You can but it would want to write it as a vmdk file rather than just adjust an existing partition or disk.

What happens if you configured a vm to use the physical disk/partition as it is and ran the convert and tried configure machine, does it give you the options to install vmware tools etc?

[AWo]

What about adding these disks via USB to an existing VM guest or hardware, then use an image tool to create an image from it? The converter can handle some image formats.

AWo

[jsa]

> You can but it would want to write it as a vmdk file rather than just adjust an existing partition or disk.

>

> What happens if you configured a vm to use the physical disk/partition as it is and ran the convert and tried configure machine, does it give you the options to install vmware tools etc?

I can't use the physical disk as a vm in the external enclosure. That seems to be the basic problem.

The drives in question are Eide, but when in the enclosure they appear as scsi.

Although I can define it in VMware, it won't run when I try to boot the VM.

Any attempt to boot will fail. Further , VMware will pop up many of warnings that this is unlikely to work,

so its not like this is an unknown problem.

(I've tried both the Firewire and the USB ports on the exclosure with the same results, although at least

the firewire will try to boot, whereas the USB just freezes).

[jsa]

> What about ading these disks via USB to an existing VM guest or hardware, then use an image tool to create an image from it? The converter can handle some image formats.

>

> AWo

I could try this.

Which tool would you suggest for imaging?

I might have something in Linux, but I don't think I have any thing on my windows platforms.

[admin]

My understanding is that Converter can also process some disk image formats. You could use one to image the disk and then run it through Converter. From the Converter FAQ:

VMware Converter can currently import system images (Windows operating system only) from Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (formerly LiveState Recovery) and Norton Ghost versions 9 and higher

[ScottG412]

You can boot a VM with any popular Linux distribution and use the disk partitioning tool in it to copy partitions from device to device. Ubuntu, for example, has the Gnome "Partition Editor" right on the menu. I've used this trick to move a Windows installation from a small hard drive to a newer, larger hard drive, for example.

[AWo]

Choose one tool which the Converter supports. You find the link inthe other post.

AWo