Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Convert VMDK to physical partition?

R

raremage

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 21, 2005
548
0
Orlando, Florida
I've been running Fusion for quite a while and have a VMDK (XP) that is fully configured and running all the tools I need.

My question is - is there a way to convert the VMDK over to a Boot Camp partition? I'm trying to avoid reinstalling all the tools I have on the VMDK.
 
Short answer: No.

Long answer: It's complicated and it's a 99% chance of not working.
 
Let's just say the 99% failure rate is because there is no tool in existence to convert it nor are there instructions to.
If you are really good hacker, you might be able to convert it, but it could take years.
 
Hmm, we could look at this in the way that the Windows XP box thinks it is a real PC.

There are tools to clone physical hard drives, and whilst there is a chance that the eventual restore to the new disk will end up not being bootable, it may be worth a punt.

If clonezilla can boot in a VM and have access to a physical USB drive or a network share, you'd be able to clone the disk and then find a way to restore it to the new partition.

It would involve loads of trial and error, probably wouldn't work, but if you want to try it, I think that it's something to try, but just to be on the safe side, make sure you have an up to date backup of everything.

Thinking about it, you'd probably be better off making a new install of windows in boot camp, use USMT to migrate your user settings and documents and put your apps on that way.
 
Driver Mis-match

If you really want to try and are willing to totally format your Mac if you fail, I'd try this:

Create the Boot Camp partition. Get the Windows installer to format the drive for you, and then cancel out of it. Get the Boot Camp 2.1 update from Apple for all the drivers.

Duplicate your VMDK and run the duplicate. Uninstall the VMware Tools.

Mount the duplicate and the Boot Camp partition in a separate virtual machine. Use a drive cloning tool to copy the data.

Good Luck.
 
A chance exists

There is a chance to do it,but it won't be converted.Some partition managers allow you to backup the partitions.So you need external disk,which would be the storage,next you need that partition manager (I prefer Paragon Backup & Recovery 10) and the target partition.Install partition manager to the VM,connect the external disk to the VM (using VMWare),backup it on the external disk.Then,install another partition manager on your OS X and extract the backup on the target partition.It worked for me using OS X 10.5.5 & Windows 7 (first VM,then Boot Camp).Hope it'll help you.
:)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back