How do I make a VMDK format virtual hard drive from a physical partition on a disk?

Question

I have a 320 GB HDD, which actually only has an 80 GB NTFS format partition which was being used by a Windows 7 system ... I want to create a VMDK format clone of this partition, so that I can use it with VMware .. However, tradition VMDK creation programs normally make a VMDK for an entire disk, whereas I just want to make a VMDK for the one 80 GB partition ... This is important because the other 240 GB on the physical source HDD is just unallocated area, and including that in a VMDK file is just a plain waste of space ..

So how to make a VMDK file for a specific partition ? Any tool available for this ?

Answer 1

Try the MakeVM tool.

Its description notes that you can use it to

Clone physical hard disk to Virtual PC, VMWare or Parallels Workstation virtual disks; you may select partitions to clone;

Answer 2

Fire up a VM and mount an empty vmdk and your raw disk or partition and use whatever partition cloning software you like. There are many free solutions if you use a Linux LiveCD to boot the VM.

The performance may be very low, but at lease this method is free.

NOTE: You should mount your raw disk read-only or remove hard disks from the boot devices. Otherwise there is a high possibility that you accidentally boot into Windows and destroy your working installation.