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I have an old hard drive that used to be in my MacBook Pro that has a Boot Camp partition. When I upgraded the hard drive in my MBP, I didn't copy over the Boot Camp partition. Now I want to use the old hard drive for something else, but don't want to lose the Boot Camp partition. Can I copy it into a VMWare image (Fusion) or otherwise copy it into some other kind of file? (It's only a 15G partition, small but not small enough to fit on a DVD).

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What I would do is put the old hard drive into an external enclosure and boot from it into Boot Camp. Then you can use the free VMware Converter to make a VM out of it.

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+1 Did this a couple weeks ago and while it took a while it has worked out well. – Chealion Sep 3 '09 at 20:46
+Thanks I thought it's paid. Can VMware Converter converter convert VMware image back to hdd? – Oleksandr Bolotov Sep 4 '09 at 16:32
There's free and paid. On your question, I'm not totally tracking. Do mean 1) can VMware converter take a VMware image and restore it onto a physical computer? Or do you mean 2) save it onto a different drive when converting. The answers are 1) not that I know of, but check around. or 2) Yes. – emgee Sep 4 '09 at 16:51
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You can dd it to an archive. Unmount all partitions on that drive or boot using live cd (SystemRescueCd for example) and do something like:

dd if=/dev/hda | gzip -c  > /some_folder/hda.img.gz

Just put right name instead of hda (it may be sda). After compression it will be much smaller.

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It will also take some time. Depending of many factor it may take a couple minutes per gig. Possibly more time if going over USB1 – Rik Schneider Sep 3 '09 at 19:33
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