[clue-tech] ghost / virtual machine

[Peter Kuykendall]

> I have a drive which may be failing on my 'other' pc, so after stripping
> off anything everything no longer needed I was able to ghost it into 2
> small files of about 4 1/2 GB total. As just about everything else is
> possible with the VMware server should I be able to restore a virtual
> machine with the ghost image? Any tricks to this?
 
Funny, right at this moment I am using partimage to capture the XP drive image from a new laptop that I just got from work.  I'm sending it to an external USB drive.  After that I'll be scrubbing the drive, then loading a minimal Ubuntu 7.10 server distribution plus very lightweight window manager.  That will be the VMWare host machine.
 
At that point I'll be *attempting* to use the VMWare workstation tool to convert the physical machine to a virtual machine.  Finally I will run the work XP stuff in a virtual machine, and personal stuff in a completely separate Ubuntu 7.10 virtual machine, both as guests under the stripped down server.
 
I'm doing it in that order because I want to avoid loading the VMWare workstation onto the XP machine before archiving it.  I want it to be in the exact same condition that it was when our IT department gave it to me.
 
We shall see how it goes!  I'll post results.