Converting a Physical Disk to a VMWare Virtual Disk

I have a Windows XP SP2 installation that I use for work, while my current personal OS of choice is Windows Vista. I only work weekends, so rebooting wasn’t too bothersome initially. Over time it has become more and more of a chore, as I can’t easily switch from one development environment to another without rebooting. I decided it was time to make my work installation a virtual machine.


I had some additional complications that made the process a little non-standard. I originally tried using VMWare’s converter tool, but it would fail at 97% of the creation of the disk. I then tried using a Windows port of the Unix utility ‘dd’ to create a raw image of the disk, but because the Windows volume manager was accessing the disk, dd would give me access errors. Additionally, the VMWare converter doesn’t support converting from a raw image (…grr…), so Qemu’s qemu-img tool would have to be used to convert the raw image to a disk in VMWare’s vmdk format.

The steps to reach our goal aren’t too complicated, and can be replicated by others easily. To do it, I used:

1.VMWare Workstation
2.A Linux installation or LiveCD (I used my existing Debian installation, but something  
   like Knoppix would work fine) 
3.Qemu
4.NTFS-3G (if you plan on writing out to an NTFS partition from Linux, as I did)

I started by booting into my Linux install. Linux only mounts the disks it uses (hint hint, Microsoft) so we can access all sectors of the partition to make a dump of the disk with dd. I first had to mount the partition where I wanted the output file to reside, which uses NTFS:

ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/external

Next, create the image. I did this with the following (substitute your device/partition and output file):

dd if=/dev/hdc3 of=/mnt/external/diskImage/XPSP2.img bs=1024

When that finishes, the file specified with the ‘of’ option in dd will contain a block-by-block exact copy of your partition. However, it is in a raw format – we need it in a format VMWare can read. This is where Qemu comes in. Qemu is distributed with qemu-img, a tool used for creating, manipulating, and converting images. Specifically, our goal is to use qemu-img’s convert functionality to convert from a raw image format to the vmdk format. This is accomplished with:

qemu-img convert -f raw /mnt/external/diskImage/XPSP2.img -O vmdk /mnt/external/diskImage/XPSP2.vmdk

Be prepared to wait. For a 40gb image, this process took roughly 12 hours. Since qemu-img provides no status as to how far it has come, I kept tabs on it just by monitoring the filesize of the output image. This is entirely unnecessary, but if you want to do the same, just open a new terminal and type the following:

while [1 -gt 0 ]; do du -hs /mnt/external/diskImage/XPSP2.vmdk; sleep 10; clear; done

This will just print out the size of the file on your screen so you can watch it grow. Alternatively, Roberte provided a tip in the comments that suggested using the “watch” command. Either will work:

watch ‘ls -lh /mnt/external/diskImage/XPSP.vmdk’

When the process is completed, boot back into Windows (or if you are using Linux as the host, stay put) and create a virtual machine around your new disk image. Don’t forget to remove the original img created with dd, it is a huge waste of disk space :)

[Notes]

1. This process is really only feasible if you have a lot of disk space. At worst, the disk requirements are greater than 2*P, where P is the partition size of the virtual machine you wish to create. However, qemu-img only writes out actual data, not empty sectors, so your output image will be the size of the used space in the input image. For my conversion, I used over 40gb (input)+15gb (output) of disk space, which was reclaimed with the deletion of the output of dd, and resizing another partition to use the old physical installation’s space.
2. qemu-img doesn’t support stream input, which is why we can’t pipe dd’s output directly into qemu-img convert. This would have reduced the disk requirements to only the size of the vmdk image, and sped up the process substantially. Bug the Qemu developers to implement this feature :)

轉自 http://www.robertpeaslee.com/index.php/converting-a-physical-disk-to-a-virtual-disk-for-free/