Virtualization
 

Per the recommendation in another thread on this Forum, I started to play with VMWare converter and was astounded at the results. I was able to image my Dell laptop and then load it onto my MAC running VMWARE Fusion. The only problem I found is that Converter imaged my whole hard drive, thus the image file was 48GB!

I guess I could either partiion my Dell computer and put the data on the second partion, or move the data off to a USB hard drive, but I would rather not mess with that right now. Does anyone know of any way I can image everything BUT the data?

thanks!

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I know that vmware provides a tool to resize a virtual disk. It is usually used to increase a disk, but perhaps it is possible to reduce a disk as well.

Sorry, I had to do it... Today's Dilbert:
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilber...3362080212.gif

You can also split a virtual disk across multiple files. If you make the files ~4.7GB, then it makes it *much* easier to back-up to DVD.

You can try the DiskMount utility. It can mount the image file on a drive letter to allow you to go in and delete unneeded files. VMWare disk images do not shrink automatically though. it takes an extra step to shrink the image file.

As I think you've guessed, the trick is to get things as small as you can at the time of imaging. When you run VMware Converter and it asks about which drives to image, there is a little drop-down next to each drive letter where you can select to keep it the current size or use the smallest amount of space (IE only the data). That may go a long way towards reducing the size. The other option you have is to make the image "growable" or fixed size...if you use growable, then move the image to your Mac, you can boot the windows image and remove anything you don't need...the disk will shrink accordingly.

As a matter of practice (notice I did not say "best practice" b/c I'm not totally convinced it has much real value) I do keep my data and OS on separate partitions (with a 3rd partition for swap files). I've found that does make things like imaging and backing up a tad bit easier. But it sounds like its too late to go that direction now...

You can shrink the disk with vmware-vdiskmanager