I have Windows 7 installed on an external hard drive that Fusion 3 uses. I'd like to move that Win 7 install to my internal Mac OS X hard drive so that Fusion stores it as a virtual disk file. How can I do this?
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Migrating Fusion/Win 7 volume
- Thread starter Cave Man
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It's already a virtual disk file unless this external drive was once upon a time bootcamped and internal and you pointed fusion at it. If that's the case, I'm not quite sure how you'd move it over.
Cheers,
As panzer said, it all depends on how it is setup on the external drive. It if is a bootcamp partition, then you're not going to get an easy migration. But if it was setup via Fusion the first time, it is nothing more then a folder (bundle) that you can copy over to your main drive any time. For work I do this all the time, we have a different install for every operating system that we store on an external drive. Then as we need to test, we just pull the image we want and test with that OS. Works great!
Would VMware's P2V tools work on a Intel Mac created Windows install? Perhaps this is a solution to moving a bootcamp partition to a VM.
http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/
Cheers,
I was messing around with Fusion 3 at some point and saw a function to "Import Boot Camp Partition" I clicked on it and it seemed to be creating a new VM based on the physical partition.
Converter is definitely the way to go if tat doesn't work.
B
Converter is definitely the way to go if tat doesn't work.
B
Honestly I didn't even know that VMWare had a converter; looks like that would work. Should give it a try. 
Honestly I didn't even know that VMWare had a converter; looks like that would work. Should give it a try.
This whole thread has given me a great idea. I can convert my company HP Windows laptop to VMware and bring it over to my Mac with full domain access (w/o IT assistance) under fusion on my Mac completely eliminating the need to carry that HP beast at all.
Cheers,
I think I've got it. There's an app at VMWare called:
VMware-FusionPCMigrationAgent-e.x.p-196547.exe
It installs a Migration Assistant-like application on the Windows drive, then you have to turn your Win security setting off or to its lowest setting (depending on which version of Windows you're using). After that, reboot the Boot Camp drive inside Fusion 3, then the app will automatically launch and provided a 4 digit code. You then choose Migrate PC from the File menu of Fusion and enter this code followed by your Windows username and password. Looks like it's working, but it will take some time. I should have the 500 gb hard drive copied to my OS X volume as a 17 gb virtual machine in a while.
Edit: Holy crap - 13 hours remaining...
VMware-FusionPCMigrationAgent-e.x.p-196547.exe
It installs a Migration Assistant-like application on the Windows drive, then you have to turn your Win security setting off or to its lowest setting (depending on which version of Windows you're using). After that, reboot the Boot Camp drive inside Fusion 3, then the app will automatically launch and provided a 4 digit code. You then choose Migrate PC from the File menu of Fusion and enter this code followed by your Windows username and password. Looks like it's working, but it will take some time. I should have the 500 gb hard drive copied to my OS X volume as a 17 gb virtual machine in a while.
Edit: Holy crap - 13 hours remaining...
Well, there you go. It really only took about 30 minutes. It must have been confused by the 500 gb drive size, which really only had about 10 gb of stuff on it. It's working just fine and I think I'm in good shape. Pretty easy, especially compared to installing Win 7 in the first place.
Let us know how that works! (or not).
One thing that happens with Converter is that the NICs are virtualized and thus lose their MAC address. Thus, if your company does DHCP reservations, you might not get an IP address.
I didn't have to re-authenticate when I migrated my last Dell/Vista box, but I know Converter didn't do the job for some license servers at work that we wanted to vistualize since the NIC (and hard drive serial numbers) were not preserved. I don't recall if this also meant we had to rejoin the domain with the new VM.
B
The converted VM would not boot because the scsi disk driver used by the VMware 3.xx converter (instead of the IDE driver used when creating the VM from scratch) is unknown to Windows 7. Windows 7 repair failed.
I am now trying migration using Fusion's Home screen option which will create the VM from the network connected Windows PC.
Of course it uses Windows VSS and cannot be set to use space on an external drive for the snapshot so I had to clone the drive to a much larger 2.5" drive to create enough free space to even start the migration. Even with the iMac and the HP using GBe it estimates 5-6 hours. I'll let you know in the morning if this works.
Cheers,
The VMware Fusion migration worked. Once the VM was created I could log in and access all domain resources without further authentication. The Cisco VPN client had to be reinstalled and the Cisco IP Communicator needed the SEP# to be the same as the one on the HP but other than that all applications work just fine.
The only issue is the long boot times and a glitch with Mcafee Ent, both problems existed before the migration and they continue to be a slight annoyance. I removed all the HP-related software (bloatware and hardware specific utilities) but the boot performance really hasn't improved. With 2GB Ram a 1CPU it takes just over a minute to login after a 22 second boot.
My old XP VM which was created from scratch was much faster and only had 1GB ram allocated to the VM.
Cheers,