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Creating Virtual PC out of a external hard drive?

  • 06-01-2010 4:01pm
    #1
    cherrio
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 383 ✭✭


    I have a laptop that died, but the hard disk is fine. I have connected up the laptop hard drive via an external enclosure to my desktop. Is it possible to turn the external (laptop) hard disk into a Virtual PC 2007 image (or a Vmware image)?

    I want to be able to "turn on" the laptop image as a virtual PC so I can pull some stuff off it. Is it possible? I have only ever done it with a live running PC. The external disk is connected via USB.

    Also, I would really like if the created image was "mountable" in windows as HDD for easy file transfer.

    Is it possible? Any advice would be great. Thanks :)


Comments

  • #2
    ED E
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 36,169 ✭✭✭✭ED E


    Not something I've done, but could you not just boot straight to the external? It might be possible, think it depends on the particular bios.

    If that works, you would run the "laptop" and have the Internal HDDs as secondary drives ready to copy to.

    As you probably know, this will bottlekneck you though so it could take some time:)


  • #3
    wolfric
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,190 ✭✭✭wolfric


    Not really too sure why you'd want to. You have it in an external case and plugged into some other computer i assume? why not just drag it directly from the drive i mean you already have it plugged into your computer. Why do you need to create a virtual machine to get the information off?

    I haven't used vmware but i currently use virtualbox. If you create a virtual disk using vmware you should be able to just copy everything down. Even better if you have twice the amount of room that's been taken up on your laptop hdd. That way you could make an iso to make the whole thing go smoother. Once you boot up in vmware you could just share the hard drive accross the network.

    a quick google returned these.
    http://www.vmts.net/article/selfp2v.htm How Convert Physical to Virtual
    http://www.vmware.com/pdf/p2v_thirdpartyimage.pdf Converting Image Files into Virtual Machine Disks
    http://digg.com/software/Convert_real_machines_to_VMWare_images_for_Free


  • #4
    ED E
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 36,169 ✭✭✭✭ED E


    wolfric wrote: »
    Why do you need to create a virtual machine to get the information off?

    Not all the data is necessarily stored in a transferable form. Contact lists and the like can need to be exported, and into a form suitable for the receiving application.


  • #5
    Nollog
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 5,514 ✭✭✭Nollog


    You can copy the contacts and settings from almost every application by copying the AppData folder.

    Where that is depends on your windows/ux version.


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