Note: This assumes you are trying to virtualize a Windows OS.
What if you had a perfectly good working hard drive but the machine that was running it was dead, DOA, not working, or had been upgraded with a new hard drive and OS? Connecting that to a machine and getting the files is easy enough but what about if you wanted to boot the OS back up? The Virtual Option is going to be your best bet but how? Sure there are plenty of options like Ghost that will keep your machine backed up with a VMDK option but how to accomplish this without spending money? Now that is a challenge…challenge accepted!
- File Extension conversion from DMG to VMDK is the conversion of computer file extensions from Apple Mac OS X Disk Image to VMware Virtual Disk File. Furthermore, each computer program handles file extensions in a different manner. Whenever any one of these variables is changed, data must be converted in some way before it can be used by a different computer, operating system or program.
- This How-To will show you how to convert a.qcow2 virtual machine file to a VMware based.vmdk, using your Mac running MacOS. Install “Homebrew” onto MacOS For the easiest process, I’m going to use Homebrew on the Mac which installs lots of cool and useful “linux-y” stuff on your Mac.
The process is generally referred to as Physical To Virtual or P2v for short. In doing some research on how to do this I’ve worked out a process that as long as you don’t mind forking over a working email address (man these sites are so clever!) you can download a couple tools to make this possible.
Convert To Vmdk For Mac Free
How to open keygen on mac. To accomplish this task you will need to complete the following steps:
- Create the virtual drive image (vmdk) file to use with VM Ware Workstation 10.x or VM Player 6.0
- Create the VMX File used by the converter
- Tranform the image with the appropriate drivers to boot (HAL, HD, etc.)
File Extension conversion from VMDK to DMG is the conversion of computer file extensions from VMware Virtual Disk File to Apple Mac OS X Disk Image. Furthermore, each computer program handles file extensions in a different manner. Whenever any one of these variables is changed, data must be converted in some way before it can be used by a different computer, operating system or program.
Depending on what machines you have at your disposal here is one method.
Step One – Download Tools
- Disk2VHD
- Use this to pull the image off the drive in to one VHD file
- Download Link: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx
- StarWind V2V Image Converter
- Used to convert the VHD to VMDK
- You will have to give them a working email address after which they will email you the link to the download…so sneaky
- Download Link: http://www.starwindsoftware.com/converter
- VM Ware Converter
- Used to load the appropriate drivers and make the VMDK ready for use, otherwise you will get blue screens or boot device errors
- You will have to have a free vmware account to access this download…even more sneaky!
- Download Link: http://www.vmware.com/products/converter
Step Two – Clean up your source!
Do yourself a favor and delete the following files:
- Hibernate and Pagefile files. Turn on show hidden, find these large guys, and delete them.
- Use “Tree Size” free edition and determine where else you can trim unneeded files: http://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/
Step Three – Create your image
- Fire up Disk2VHD
- Uncheck “Use Vhdx”, Starwind will complain that it is not a valid image
- Check “Prepare for use in Vitual PC” if you are running on XP or Windows Server 2003. This will save you the “VMware Converter” step.
- Check the partition you wish to backup
- If Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, or higher also backup the hidden system partition that starts with “?Volume{12393df90-…”. You will need this.
- Save to a location that has twice the space as DIsk2VHD recommends as you will need space for the VMDK in the next step.
- If you get Shadow Copy errors, just uncheck that box. It is a convenience, not a deal breaker. It’s used more (I believe) for copying hard drives on machines that are still running AKA your boot drive.
- Create!
- Fire Up StarWind V2V Image Converter
- Run this as administrator
- Select the VHD
- I recommend “VMWare growable image” so that it doesn’t take up space for empty drive space. You can always use the vmware tools to change this.
- Pick IDE
- Select the Save Spot
- Next starts the process…now do something else as unless your drive is small or your machine is insanely fast it is going to take a bit to crunch
- Fire up VM Player
- We need to create the VMX file so that the Converter can process the VMDK file. If you are handy with creating these by hand then skip this step but with the latest version of VM Player, it will create new VM’s from scratch which is something the earlier Pre-5.0 versions would not.
- Go ahead and create the directory for where you want the vmx and vmdk output. Vmware images work much better silo’d and segmented from other files.
- Note: If you have VM Workstation you can use the custom set up of the new VM to select an existing VMDK
- Click “Create a New Virtual Machine”
- Select “I will install the operating system later”
- Pick the appropriate OS
- Use the default location. We are going to move the VMX to the directory you created on step 3.2
- Pick the Size Disk and Single/Multi File, does not really matter. We are just trying to get the VMX created
- The hardware for CPU, RAM, etc. doesn’t matter as much, you will edit these on VM Player once you have converted the image.
- Edit the VMX File
- Make sure somewhere in the file is the following lines:
- ide1:0.present = “TRUE”
- ide1:0.fileName = “C:VMOld MachineOLD-PC.vmdk”
- Where filename equals the path to your VMDK
- Save this file to the directory you created in step 3.2
- This should work…
- Fire Up Vmware Converter
- You do not have to run this as administrator though it does not hurt
- Go ahead and create ANOTHER directory for where you want the FINAL vmx and vmdk output. This is a different directory from step 3.2.
- Click the ‘Convert Machine’
- From the “Select Source Type:” drop down select
- Select your vmx file
- Click Next. If Converter has issues with the VMX this is where it will puke and stop.
- Select the product you’re going to use the VMDK on, Player or Workstation and the directory. This will need to be the directory you created for step 4.2 and not the directory you created in step 3.2
- Review the final details and Next
- Finish to start the process
- Errors with Server 2008, Windows 7, or newer OS (Unable to Find the System Volume, reconfiguration is not possible)
- First, you need to make sure you got the ‘System Reserved’ partition in the image that you made from the source disk. This is the boot loader partition and without it things are pretty hopeless though I’m sure someone has figured out a workaround.
- Second, you will need either the original or similar in system version ISO of the OS you are trying to recover as you will need it to boot up and run several commands.
- Third, you will need to use VM Player or workstation to boot up the source VMDK. You will need to add the ISO referenced in step 5.2 and you will probably need to boot in to the VM bios in order to make the CD ISO bootable. There is a handy option now to boot straight in to the bios, saving you the effort of having to bang the keyboard before the post finishes and boots in to the OS.
- Once you have booted in to the recovery/setup, you will need to follow these steps outlines in this webpage: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1037507
- If you do a “bcdedit’ and the partition says ‘unknown’ use this
- If your OS is on ‘D:’ use step 10 and not 8, this is what I had to do for my Server 2008 R2 image
- I did not have to do the regedit, just the bcdedit commands. This fixed the ‘unknown’ issues
![Vmdk Vmdk](https://www.sysprobs.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/vdi-to-vmdk.png)
If this seems like a lot of steps, it is but I tried to skip obvious steps/defaults. The challenge was mostly getting the right tools, understanding the order of operation, and then the new boot loader Microsoft uses for its latest OS’s. If someone actually uses this and needs help, finds a missing step, dead link, or just a general question please leave a comment and I’ll do my best, thanks for the read and hope this has been helpful.
Here are the pages that I used to help kick start this:
- And about a million VMware Community Forum Posts
Disk Converter tools are essential especially when you are migrating virtual machine workloads between two hypervisors. Each Hypervisor uses different virtual machine disk formats such as VMDK for VMware virtual disk and VHD for Hyper-V based virtual machine disks. You may need some tools to convert VHD to VMDK if you are importing VM from Hyper-V to VMware ESXi because ESXi host will not understand the disk format of Hyper-V virtual machine (VHD). There are lot of free tools in the market to convert disk format of virtual machines to make it compatible to different hypervisors.
We are going to list out the some of 3 of the free tools to Convert VHD to VMDK and vice versa. I have personally used this tools for my lab environment to convert virtual machine disks such as VHD to VMDK and VMDK to VHD to import and test virtual machine workloads across Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESXi. The order listed here may not have any preference of 1 or 2 or any order. I have explained some of the important features of each of the free Conversion software for better understanding.
Top 3 Free Tools to Convert VHD to VMDK and Vice Versa
Let’s take a look at the major features of all of the 3 tools which allows you to convert VHD to VMDK and VMDK to VHD.
Starwind V2V Converter
StarWind V2V Converter is a free download tool that allows the conversion and cloning of VMs from one format to another and is utilized when migration or hypervisor switch is required. Compared to typical converters built into hypervisors, StarWind V2V Converter performs bi-directional conversion between multiple VM formats such as VHD to VMDK and VMDK to VHD. Starwind V2v Converter supports the most widely used formats: VMDK, VHD/VHDX (Windows Repair Mode aware), StarWind native IMG and QCOW. New idea 5209 discbine service manual.
Convert To Vmdk For Mac Os
Supports multiple destination formats to convert.
Features of Starwind V2V Converter
- Supports conversion of most widely used disk formats such as VMDK, VHD, and VHDX.
- Supports Single Copy. Starwind V2V software allows the Conversion of VM formats directly from one hypervisor to another. You no need to maintain the local copy on the system.
- Allows easily Migrating Workloads between different hypervisors by converting disk formats. StarWind V2V Converter supports all industry-standard hypervisors including Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware ESXi, Citrix XenServer, and KVM
- StarWind V2V Converter makes migration between different hardware sets easier, supporting Windows Repair Mode during conversion to VHDX.
VMware Converter Standalone
VMware Converter Standalone is the free conversion software from VMware. You can download VMware Converter from VMware WebSite. Take a look at my article to understand How to download and install VMware Converter and also How to Perform P2V and V2V conversion using VMware Converter.
VMware Converter also supports multiple formats of the virtual machine and physical machine to convert to VMware Virtual machine and also Converts other formats of Disk to VMDK format.
VMware Converter standalone has Centralized management console allows you to queue up and monitor many simultaneous conversions, both local and remote, such as in headquarters and branch offices. In addition to the P2V conversion, VMware Converter can also be used to perform Virtual to Virtual (v2v) migrations too.
Convert Vmdk To Vhd Mac
VMware Converter provides hot cloning capability which makes conversions non-disruptive, with no source server downtime or reboot. It helps us to perform reliable conversion by making use of Quiescing and snapshot of the guest operating system on the source machine before migrating the data.
In addition to the P2V and V2V, VMware Converter can also be used to reconfigure the virtual machines such as Shrinking a VMDK of virtual machine, Converting VMDK disk format from Thin to Thick and vice versa, Upgrading virtual machine Hardware version or compatibility.
WinImage
WinImage is a fully-fledged disk-imaging suite for easy creation, reading and editing of many image formats and filesystems, including DMF, VHD, FAT, ISO, NTFS and Linux. The disk image is an exact copy of a physical disk (floppy, CD-ROM, hard disk, USB, VHD disk, etc.) or a partition that preserves the original structure. With WinImage in place, you can recreate the disk image on the hard drive or other media, view its content, extract image-based files, add new files and directories, change the format, and defragment the image. Bitsadmin exe.
Features of WinImage
Convert Vmdk To Iso Mac
- Create a disk image from a removable drive (like USB drive), CD-ROM, floppy,
- Extract file(s) from a disk image,
- Create empty disk images,
- Inject files and directories into an existing disk image,
- Change a disk image format,
- Defragment a disk image,
- A powerful “Batch assistant” mode that lets you automate many operations,
Convert To Vmdk For Mac Os
WinImage is shareware. You may evaluate it for a period of 30 days. After 30 days, you need to register it if you intend to continue using WinImage.
Convert Vmdk To Dd
I Will talk about the detailed procedure to convert disk formats using these Free tools in upcoming tools. I hope this is informative for you. Thanks for reading !!!. Be social and share it with social media, if you feel worth sharing it.