How to make your operating system into a vmware image.
When I was converting over to linux I was not sure that I would get everything from my windows operating system. Instead of just deleting it I thought it would be better to make it in to a VMware image so if I needed a windows operating system then I could use it in VMWare player in Debian.
Things you will need:
External hard drive with enough space to fit your back file.if your windows take up space is 30GB then make sure you have 40GB free on the harddrive. make sure the hard drive has NTFS format instead of fat32. This is because the backup is going to be one file larger than 4GB and fat32 can only support 4GB maximum in one file.
You will need Hiren 10.1 boot CD. You can download the CD from this site and it is free.
To start of:
Burn the ISO to CD. Reboot your computer. Make sure you have your computer setup so it can boot from CD first then boot the hard drive. This is done in the bios settings of the computer.
When you boot this will be the first screen you will see but it will say v10.1 instead of v9.8
Click on Backup Tools and you will come to this screen. Choose Acronis True Image Enterprise server.
It will boot up the Acronis software. In Acronis choose to make a back up of your hard drive. Choose your external hard drive as the place you want to save it. You can not choose to save the back up to the partition you are making the back up of.
Then proceed with the backup. This going to take a while depending how big your partition is. A tip to make it faster is take off everything of the partition like music, movies, documents and pictures and put them on an external hard drive. This will make the disk taken up on thepartition much smaller and speed up the back up.
After about hours of backing up Acronis should have a single files of your back up. Now you need to convert the .tib file to a file structure that vmware player understands.
You can use vmware converter 4 to this for you.
Download the software and install it on a windows xp machine. You can also use the windows you backed up if it is XP.
Do not do the conversion on Vista. I tried and it did not work for me. Not sure why but when I did on xp it worked first time.
