Convert a physical disk - Not a live OS

[Dyspare]

Hey All,

I've been looking around for a solution to this, but am having a lot of issues. I have a hard drive out of another computer that I'd like to convert to a VM. I've tried disk2vhd without much success (The OS won't boot due to hard ware changes). Anyway, I decided to try VMWare vCenter Converter, but it only gives me an option to convert the live OS I'm currently using?

Am I missing something here?

Any direction would be appreciated!

Thanks,

[Rosen Tomov]

Attach the physical hard disk to some other machine and then convert it, the Converter needs an OS to transfer the disk content.

[Dyspare]

Hey, thanks for the reply.

I have the drive connected to the machine I'm on now, it just isn't the booted OS. Am I missing an option within vCentre Converter that allows me to convert a disk that isn't the booted OS?

[Rosen Tomov]

This is very tricky conversion :smileyhappy: create a VM with this disk only, then try to configure new VM... hope you succeed :smileywink:

Forgot to say: do not reconfigure target VM, if there are differences between your running OS and real OS, edit VM's settings before reconfigure task.

[Dyspare]

Well, I made it a bit further, and was able to convert the disk, but encountered a new issue.

The disk consist of two partitions, the boot info and the data info. I select both and it creates TWO vmdk files. I need these all in one VM... If I boot the first one, it loops "looking for files", if I boot the second one, it simply says "Invalid boot device". With disk2vhd I was able to select both partitions and have it create ONE file. Is this doable with vCenter?

[Rosen Tomov]

The Converter gives ability to select disk for volume(s) in Advanced settings. HTH

[continuum]

For such a task any Linux LiveCD can be used like:

dd if=/dev/sda of=import-flat.vmdk bs=20M

then you only need to manually create import.vmdk - but that is easy