Software to Clone a Laptop into a Virtual Machine

radderfire · 30 Mar 2009 at 13:28

Hi All

After experiencing the major inconvenience of my laptop hard drive dying, I want to make sure that next time I am better prepared.

I want to have a solution where I can clone a given laptop, so that I can immediately restore the whole laptop again or have access to an identical copy of the laptop on another machine as necessary.

What is the best software to do the initial clone?

What's the easiest way to make sure your restore works, and to make sure the clone is always accessible on another machine? I could buy some virtual machine technology if necessary. Would VM Ware be worthwhile?

Thanks for all comments.

Rgds

radderfire · 30 Mar 2009 at 14:32

Thanks for the responses. I see I can get a free download of VMware Converter from:

http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/

So, I make the copy of the laptop with VMware Converter, and then what do I need to have the laptop fully usable as a virtual machine running on my desktop?

Many thanks

radderfire · 30 Mar 2009 at 15:14

OK great.

Once you have the laptop working in a virtual machine on your desktop, can you then just copy a file out of the laptop virtual machine onto the desktop hard drive?

Thanks

radderfire · 30 Mar 2009 at 15:48

Ok thanks.

Once I have a VM working in VMware server, if I do some work in that VM, will the data just get saved into the VM files (.vmdk, .vmx)?

Thanks

radderfire · 30 Mar 2009 at 16:01

Another question. I see the Converter has created the following folders and files:

computername.vmdk.lck folder
computername.vmdk
computername.vmx

So, if I want to have access to the above VM on another of my computers, is it just a case of copying this set of files across?

Thanks

radderfire · 30 Mar 2009 at 23:54

CliffyG said:
I was under the impression you couldnt convert back from a vm image though? Which makes vmware kind of pointless in this situation. Your best bet for what you want is some sort of disk cloning software such as ghost, acronis etc.

All I care about is business continuity, i.e. once my laptop drive fails I don't want to have to spend the next few days reinstalling everything and faffing around. If I have to always work in a virtual machine, that would be fine, as long as I can keep a backup copy of that virtual machine somewhere and can instantly restore it to another computer if needs be. Is that possible, thoughts anyone?

Rgds