make an image of my linux hdd on a vmware machine

[linuxtolinux]

hi all,
I want to make an image of my hard drive on my personal pc which include linux os.
I am new to vmware , I need to know if vmware provides a tool to do such task ?
because a read about the clone tool but it is applied on a virtual machine.
so more clearly my question is does vmware provide a clone from a real machine?


thanks in advance

[Alexander Finkel]

VMWare has an additional product known as P2V Assistant which can be used to migrate a physical machine to a vm, but it does not support Linux unfortunately.

If you have Ghost you might be able to use that as VMWare can import from Ghost 9 and later image files. Recent versions of Ghost support ext2/ext3 and Linux swap partitions.

No guarantees but it might be worth a try.

You could always do a fresh install of Linux under VMWare and then transfer files over later.

[linuxtolinux]

hi alexander,
thanks a lot for the information you provided for me .
I will try the ghost method and let you know the result as soon as possible .

[Gallig Renaud]

Hi,

Some P2V tools are available from HP and from VMWare. As Alexander wrote, vmware tool does not support Linux. Unfortunately, neither does HP's :(

One solution could be to use an imaging tool such as mondorescue (free software rocks ;)): http://developer.berlios.de/projects/mondorescue/

It is supporting most of the Linux distro and it is working just fine.

The procedure will be:
- Install mondorescue on your system
- Create a new initrd file with drivers that are required by the VM (buslogic or lsilogic for instance)
- Create an image using mondoarchive (easy... just follow the instructions)
- Create an empty VM with enough hard drive space in it (Mondo will resize partitions to fit the Virtual HD)
- Restore your image to the freshly created VM
- Reboot and enjoy

If your computer was running on a IDE hard drive, You might have to change some files at the first reboot (grub.conf and fstab, moving from hda to sda for instance).

Hope this help...
If you need more information on a specific step, ask :)