VMWare -> Physical Box

[Philipp Ott]

Hi!

>From: "Ryan D'Baisse" <ryan.dbaisse at gmail.com>
>Subject: VMWare -> Physical Box
>How feasible do you think it would be to pull the contents from a VMWare
>virtual drive onto a physical drive and have it function properly?  I have a
>development VM that I use with FC4 and it works perfectly.  All of my apps
>and settings are just right.  It would be great to be able to pull that VM
>out of VMWare and make it live.
>  
>


What OS do you run inside VMware? Windows or Linux?

If Windows it might work using a software like Norton Ghost. I think you 
can can mount a physical drive into VMware as a secondary drive. Then 
you would boot with the Ghost floppy disk and run an image copy from the 
virtual drive to the physical drive. However I dont think that Windows 
installation will boot then successfully because of the VMware drivers 
and I dont think a Windows Boot CD (W2K oder WXP) would bootfix this 
then... The last OS from Microsoft that was surviving motherboard 
changes best was NT 3.51 :-)

Linux should work though and you wont need Ghost. Booting with some 
linux rescue / live CD in VMware you would create partitions (boot, 
root) on the second drive and then mount the first harddisk, cp -ax the 
files from the virtual drive onto the physical one and then take care of 
the boot loader and the boot partition with the kernel image.

Any other OS i have no idea about :-)

Regards,
Philipp Ott