Question about Virtual Machine systems

[James Lee Bell]

The other direction one can go, if settling upon usage of VMware, is to 
use the free vmware converter to create a VM from existing install, 
which unfortunately is windows only AFAIK. This means that conversion 
must happen either from the system to be copied itself after installing 
the converter, or another win machine into which you temporarily 
transplant the drive.

Using these tools and having a large enough and accessible mapped drive 
or CIFS/SMB share (wish it had even FTP or SFTP but no such luck), you 
can get a good clone of it and not as many license or device issues as 
technomage-hawke mentions.  VMWare Player and server are free also. I've 
just done this with my work laptop and other than getting dual monitors 
working with Ubuntu things are fine.

Now, as for more FOSS type vm software, I don't know of any of them with 
similar conversion capabilities, which puts you into the "install 
windows from scratch into VM" bucket that he mentions.

Technomage-hawke wrote:
> On Sunday 13 January 2008 12:21, Joseph Sinclair wrote:
>> All,
>>   Knowing that some of you are far more experienced with running things in
>> a VM than I am, I would like to know if any of you have ideas for the
>> following scenario:
>>
>>   I have a family member who is running Windows XP and the box it's on is
>> dying fast.  Rather than buy a new Windows box and attempt to, maybe,
>> migrate everything, my thought is to take a full disk backup of the Windows
>> machine and load that into a Virtual Machine on one of my Linux systems. 
> 
> now, the other answer, yes and no. yes, you can transplant the drive into the 
> new machine and startup vmware using the drive as "native hardware". windows 
> will bitch a bit, but then it will allow installation of new hardware (the 
> new hardware found wizard). HOWEVER, some devices will not be present and 
> some drivers may get confused as a result. YMMV
> 
> the best case would be to install windows as a new vmware session, the copy 
> some of the relevant data from the old drive onto the new system. this avoids 
> the hardware issues of trying to transplant an already installed drive. you 
> may still be required to re-auth with MSFT though (depending on OS version).