How to convert laptop drive for use as VMware image?
I have a windows laptop that recently died (dead motherboard). It being a 7 year old laptop, I decided to give Apple a try this time around and try to use VMware to access my old data if necessary.
In order to do this, I need to convert the physical drive to a VMware image. Googling around, it looks like I might be able to use VMware Convertor to do this.
My original thought was to plug the laptop drive into a windows desktop via an external USB enclosure and create the image that way, then transfer the working VM to the Mac. However, upon further investigation, it looks like VMware Converter only supports converting a local machine (the desktop) or a remote machine (via IP) but not a laptop drive plugged into the local machine. Obviously, if my original laptop was still functional, I could install and run vmware converter from there but that's not an option here.
So with that in mind, I'm looking for suggestions and help on how to convert this laptop drive into something I can use on my new Macbook Pro.
We have just performed this operation on two PCs, a dead desktop and a dead laptop.
It was a long haul though, and most of the suggestion over at How to convert laptop drive (with a dead laptop) for use as VMware image? were of limited use.
What didn't work
We tried creating a new VM with both raw disk access and it's own virtual disk, cloning one to the other (using clonezilla) and then running the VMware convert utility on it, but that resulted in VMs which blue screened on boot, so that wasn't a solution.
- Note: Using Ultimate P2V (as suggested in harrymc's answer) should get rid of the bluescreen, but I haven't tried this and http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk requires you to register to read the full article. Similarly How Convert Physical to Virtual contains details of how to manually change the VMs HAL, but that really is a complex option.
We tried the create a new VM, attach the raw hard drive to the VM and convert method, but that just gave a cryptic error message with the current vmware-vdiskmanager program.
We tried looking at the solutions on ServerFault for Convert a hard-drive into a VMware machine but most of those solutions had too little detail to get us past the problems we had with those suggested solutions.
What worked
The solution that we settled on was in an answer suggested by Dave M on that question though.
We downloaded and installed the trialware version of Symantec System Recovery Server Edition (which at the time was Symantec™ System Recovery 2011 Server Edition FREE 60-day Evaluation! but is now Symantec™ System Recovery 2013 Server Edition FREE 60-day Evaluation!).
We then created a one-off backup of each target hard drive (one for the desktop PC hard drive we had, one for the laptop hard drive), creating two recovery points. Then we performed a one-off conversion of each to a virtual machine.
We selected the option to Run Windows Mini-Setup and Split virtual disk into 2 GB (.vmdk) files. The former substantially reduces the time to get the resulting VM up and running, while the second allows you to transport VMs around on memory sticks that don't support >2GB files/
We then booted each VM in VMware Player, the Windows mini setup ran through quickly, installing the new virtual drivers & replacing the old real drivers.
Finally we installed VMware tools on each VM and let the VMs pick up the new VMware tools optimised drivers.
The only downside with this method is that it does require re-activation of windows, so make sure you have noted down the product key of the dead machine before you start.
Note that we tried this procedure on a Windows 8 PC first, but couldn't get SSRSE to run after it was installed, so reverted to using a Windows XP machine (on the same hardware). We assume that when the trial gets upgraded from 2011 to 2013, this problem will go away.
Before this I've only ever virtualised running machines and the process has been quick and painless with VMware converter. I was amazed to find out that virtualising a dead system from it's hard drive alone would be so much more involved, I just assumed that VMware converter would just have an option to do it.
First step is to make the disk available on a functioning computer, then convert it to VMDK.
The dd2vmdk utility will work with a Linux Live CD and help you create the VMDK. This link is to a very detailed article with screenshots describing the procedure.
The process uses a browser-based application that will create scripts whose output you should feed back to the browser application. The idea is to copy (dd) the raw disk to a file and then build a VMDK file that uses that image as its disk.
Once you have done this, it is a matter of using the Ultimate P2V utility (linked at the end of the dd2vmdk article) to replace the HAL and prevent the bluescreen. Sadly the Ultimate P2V article is mostly hidden behind a registration wall, so this Bart PE forum post or this Guru-corner post might be more immediately accessible.
An alternative and perhaps simpler method, once the raw disk was copied to a file, is to use VirtualBox, through the VBoxManage convertfromraw command, to convert it to VMDK format.
The command may look like :
VBoxManage convertfromraw <filename> <outputfile> --format VMDK --variant Standard
With your hard drive plugged in via USB, you should be able to create an image of the hard drive as a VMDK file for use by a VMware Virtual Machine. T
If VMware Converter running on an OS with this disk attached cannot do it, you may be able to find a free converter out there (see link below) to convert a disk with a NTFS, Fat32, or other filesystem to a VMDK file.
You would create a new Virtual Machine with the same operating system as the same type installed on your previous laptop. This will create a Virtual Machine that you can add a virtual hard drive(VMDK) to (in this case you would point the Virtual Machine to the VMDK file you created via "Edit Settings" on the VM).
Try searching and/or asking on the VMware Communities: http://communities.vmware.com/ usually you will get a quick response, or find a post from someone who has done the same thing.
Good Luck!
-bn