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Convert HDD from a broken comuter to virtual machine

Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2011 11:07 am
by sveins
It would be very valuable to be able to convert HDD from a broken computer to virtual machine. Consider the following situations:
We have broken motherboard and it is most likely that the machine will not run after replacing the motherboard (to often with a different type). If one would be able to convert the HDD form the faulty computer to virtual then it would be easy to sysprep the virtual machine and copy everything from the virtual HDD to a new HDD. After that it is almost certain that the repaired machine will run saving a lot of work setting it up from scratch and shortening the downtime.

Two more situations when a cold clone would be valuable. The former is when some computer that the company can not at all live without long enough breaks down due to hardware worn out and is going to be replaced. In that case it would be valuable to be able to run it as a virtual machine giving time to build a new computer. The latter is similar and in that case one could convert a broken workstation to a virtual machine and give the user the virtual machine to use meanwhile a new computer is being prepared. When the new computer is ready one would use Windows Easy Transfer to transfer all user setting and data from the virtual machine to the new one saving considerable time and keeping all the user settings.

The problem is that StarWinds converter seems not to be able to cold clone and I have so far not found any means of doing that. I have downloaded vmWare Standalone Converter and it should be able to cold clone but it does not work. Due you know of any software capable of doing such a conversion?

Re: Convert HDD from a broken comuter to virtual machine

Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2011 11:33 am
by anton (staff)
StarWind Converter is all about V2V (Virtual-to-Virtual). What you really need here is P2V (Physical-to-Virtual). So unfortunately we cannot help here. You really need to look at some other commercial implementations. There are quite a lot of them so Google a bit :) No direct experience with any of them so far...