Create Vmware image from exisiting Ubuntu installation

Question

I have been stuck on a netbook since last year due to budget constraints, but finally managed to get a decent laptop from a very generous person. Now my ubuntu installation in the netbook has all my development tools, libraries, personal mediawiki, other servers and things that I'm only reminded when the command line complains. I can always ssh into my netbook, but don't want to carry both the computers all the time. Is it possible to create an image from my netbook Ubuntu and use it out of the box in a Vmware player in the new laptop?

Solution

You can use VMware vCenter Converter if using VMware product, it can be downloaded here Converter Link

Or make a image of your HDD with ddrescue or dd and convert it to virtual HDD with Virtual Box CLI (output image can be VBox Image or VMware Image).

## make a image

#ddrescue <your_HDD_dev_file> /path/to/netbookhdd.img /tmp/converthdd.log

## convert to vbox hdd

#VBoxManage internalcommands converthd -srcformat RAW -dstformat VDI /path/to/netbookhdd.img /path/to/netbookhdd.vdi

Create new Virtual Machine, and assign that HDD.

Have fun,

Comments

[Tathagata]

Hi Beth, thank you so much for the pointers. I've been trying to work with the P2V converter but kept getting A general system error occurred: Not initialized: converter.info.StorageInfo storage.volume.diskId. Could not really understand reading the logs what's wrong but must be my messy partition table (wubi installed ubuntu). need to try ddrescue way ...