How to convert laptop drive for use as VMware image?

Question

I have a windows laptop that recently died (dead motherboard). It being a 7 year old laptop, I decided to give Apple a try this time around and try to use VMware to access my old data if necessary.

In order to do this, I need to convert the physical drive to a VMware image. Googling around, it looks like I might be able to use VMware Convertor to do this.

My original intent was to plug the laptop drive into a windows desktop via an external USB enclosure and create the image that way. However, upon further investigation, it looks like VMware Converter only supports converting a local machine (the desktop) or a remote machine (via IP) but not a laptop drive plugged into the local machine.

So with that in mind, I'm looking for suggestions and help on how to convert this laptop drive into something I can use on my new Macbook Pro.

Answer 1

With your hard drive plugged in via USB, you should be able to create an image of the hard drive as a VMDK file for use by a VMware Virtual Machine. T

If VMware Converter running on an OS with this disk attached cannot do it, you may be able to find a free converter out there (see link below) to convert a disk with a NTFS, Fat32, or other filesystem to a VMDK file.

You would create a new Virtual Machine with the same operating system as the same type installed on your previous laptop. This will create a Virtual Machine that you can add a virtual hard drive(VMDK) to (in this case you would point the Virtual Machine to the VMDK file you created via "Edit Settings" on the VM).

Try searching and/or asking on the VMware Communities: http://communities.vmware.com/ usually you will get a quick response, or find a post from someone who has done the same thing.

Good Luck!

-bn

Answer 2

Do you want to boot it, or just access the data? if its the latter, plug it into a USB drive caddy, image it with tools already in OS X, and access it as a disk image - i did a similar thing for a client, though using windows based tools - and OS X has most of what you need baked in - I'm not a mac user, but disc utility would likely do what you need if its a simple data recovery you need.