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maxel
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Cold Clone CD?

Hi!

Is there always a Cold Clone CD for convert physical machine to VM? Where can i download it? Found only Converter Standalone...

Thx

Tomber

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4 Replies
daphnissov
Immortal
Immortal

Not in the latest versions. They discontinued that CD years ago.

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continuum
Immortal
Immortal

Hi Axel
VMware no longer maintains a Coldclone CD.
However I still have aconstruction kit to create one yourself - it requires this 2 ingredients that you must find yourself:
- a Win2003 server installation CD
- VMware Converter 3.0.3
This maybe the most convenient solution for you but it is not the best one out there because driver support for Windows 2003 maybe missing for your physical hardware.
To work around this I found a procedure that uses an uptodate Linux LiveCD that exports the source machine drives via iSCSI.
The receiving end would be a Windows VM with iSCSI support.
Advantage - this works with all Converter versions after 3.0.3
If you want to do this more than once - it is worth learning this approach.
Feel free to contact me via skype ...

Ulli


________________________________________________
Do you need support with a VMFS recovery problem ? - send a message via skype "sanbarrow"
I do not support Workstation 16 at this time ...

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jgonzgp
Contributor
Contributor

Hey Axel, not sure if you were able to solve this issue, but I was able to clone a super old baremetal Linux server using Clonezilla.

  • Booted from CloneZilla to clone the baremetal drive to an image, which I transferred to a USB drive.
  • Created a new VM in VMware.
  • Booted that VM from CloneZilla, and used the restore mode to restore the image in the VM.

Worked like a charm. Couple issues you may or may not run into:

  • "VFS: Cannot open root device "LABEL=/" or unknown-block(0,0)" during startup.
    • I was able to overcome this by changing the virtual disk's adapter type within VMware from SCSI to IDE.
  • "can't get IP address" during startup.
    • I overcame this by changing the network adapter type within VMware from "Flexible" to "E1000".

Good luck!

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jgonzgp
Contributor
Contributor

One more thing:

I had another issue with the VM booted from CloneZIlla not detecting the USB drive mounted on my own machine, most likely since CloneZilla's lack of VMware Tools prevents that abstraction from working. I was able to get the VM to see the image by transferring my image to an NFS share, and luckily CloneZilla provided an option to browse an NFS share for images.

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