Convert a hard-drive into a VMWare machine

Question

I have a hard-drive from a dead server, and I would like to convert it to a virtual machine. (original system OS is windows 2003)

I know VMWare converter can convert a physical machine to a VMWare image, but is there any way to convert a hard drive to a VMWare hard-drive image to use as a virtual machine? I can't find such an ability listed in the description of VMWare convertor.

Answer 1

Well you could connect the drive to some computer that will support it, and take a disk image with ghost/dd/favorite-cloning-util. Then create a new VM boot up your disk-image utility and restore the image.. If you are lucky all the drivers vmware needs will already be installed into windows.

Answer 2

You can use what's called "raw disk mode" to mount that drive into a VM. Plug it into your machine with VMware on it, and create a normal VM. Then, delete the disk image associated with it, and "add" a new disk to the VM. You'll then have the option to use an existing disk as the backing store for the VMDK file.

At this point, you ought to be able to duplicate the VM, and the copy should have a real VMDK file with real data in it.

I've "virtually resurrected" an ancient Windows 95 laptop in this manner.

Answer 3

Some have already mentioned the direct disk mode, but there could be problems with drivers and such. Sometimes VMWare gets finicky if the converter hasn't intervened to play with the HAL and drivers for the hard disk controller, so you end up with a virtual paperweight.

One option to try if you're just trying to get data off the drive is Macrium Reflect; it clones disks and enables you to mount the resulting image as a lettered drive on Windows. Free for most functionality and personal use, last I checked. Information can be found here.

Answer 4

You can connect the drive to a functional system and then create an image of the drive with Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery. That image can be converted to a VMware image using the conversion tool in Backup Exec System Recovery. I belive there is a free 60 day trial version that can be downloaded. Have used several times with good success.

Answer 5

A few days ago i do this first converting the HD to a Acronis image and then i use vCenter Converter to import into ESXi.

Answer 6

This isn't exactly what you're asking for, but if you can attach the disk to the VMWare host, you can assign a whole disk to a VM and it will access it natively (of course, it will still have the HAL for the previous server).