How do you copy a physical hard drive to a Vmware virtual hard disk?

Question

Is there any way to copy a physical hard drive to a virtual drive for use in Vmware Workstation?

Answer 1

In VMWare Workstation, File->import supports a physical machine as the source

Answer 2

Sure is, you can make it an ISO and mount it on the system. Beware, that it will take up as much harddisk space as the drive it's a copy of, so you'll want to do this on another drive. There are far easier ways. For instance: Use "File->Import" on the Workstation to choose the harddrive as the source drive to mount.

Answer 3

You can add a windows (samba) share on your hardware node, and go to it through your virtual node (\) to copy the files. Alternatively, you can use the network browsing feature to locate the files on the shared drive, and copy them.

Answer 4

VMware (and I think most VM vendors) have "physical-to-virtual" conversion tools that should do the job. It's been a long time since I've tried them, but when I did I had no good luck (I'm sure that's probably not the case anymore - it's been a very long time).

However, if you find they don't work for you, you can do what I usually do - attach an empty virtual drive to an existing virtual machine and use Ghost or Acronis (or any other drive imaging software) to image the physical disk to the empty VM disk. This works great - just like if you wanted to copy a drive from one physical machine to another.

Answer 5

You can attach a blank VMDK as a disk drive with SmartVDK and copy the files over to it.

If you want to preserve ACLs and all the NTFS metadata (make a perfect image,) use ImageX to capture an image of the physical disk. And then immediately apply the image to the attached virtual disk drive. You'll need enough space to have a complete backup of the source hard drive, though.

Answer 6

you can just 'dd' your /dev/hda or /dev/hda1 to a file. i.e. if you are on a linux box.

on Windows get a windows dd, and use \DosDevices\DriveC ( or something like that too lazy to look around).

Answer 7

easy.

Create a new virtual disk that is the size of the physical disk you want to copy.

on the Machines sidebar list in Vmware, go to settings, select the disk, map it to a drive letter on the host machine, use your favorite imaging software to copy the physical disk to the VM disk.

This is nice because it's a direct copy and does not require in image which would otherwise mean a third copy of the disk would be needed temporarily.