Can i run 64bit window vista in a virtual machine on quad core processor with 4GB RAM

Question

Currently i have installed vista 64bit on my computer with quad core.

Now i want to convert that vista to vmdk and use it in virtual machine.

can i do that

Answer 1

Absolutely, assuming the target host machine has hardware virtual assist such as Intel's VT , which is required to run 64-bit VMs. You can use Workstation to do the conversion for you by poking File, Import/Export and following the wizard to convert a physical machine (either "This machine" or a remote machine, depending on where your copy of Workstation lives).

Or, you can give the free VMware vCenter Converter a try as well.

Answer 2

Warning: It's probably better to just create a new image, install Windows onto it inside the virtual machine, and then copy your data to it.

That said, you need a partition big enough to hold your entire Windows partition. You may be able to shrink your Windows partition using something like gparted to make this work better (but be careful, resizing a Windows partition can end up badly).

1. Get a live CD with some sort of Linux.
2. Open the terminal and become root. This probably involves typing su or sudo su.
3. Mount a partition big enough to hold the partition your Windows install is on (for the purposes of this post I'm assuming you mounted it to /mnt/bigpartion).
4. Find the name of the drive with Windows on it. DO NOT MOUNT THIS PARTITION. It will probably be /dev/[h ors]d[a letter][a number]. I'm assuming it's /dev/sda1.
5. dd if=/dev/sda1 bs=10M of=/mnt/bigpartion/windows.img

Your Windows partition is now copied into an image named windows.img. In Windows it will show up as [DriveLetter]:\windows.img

EDIT: Added bs=8M to the dd command, it should be much faster than running without it. Also a warning not to mount the Windows partition, because running dd on a live filesystem is bad.