VMWare Convertor coolness...

Dell have finally deigned to deliver my replacement laptop (Original went in for repair in early December!).

As mentioned previously, I'm in the habit of backing up my machine to an external disk on a regular basis (o.k. maybe not that regular - but at least before it gets taken away for repair!!!) using Acronis True Image.

This offers a handy utility whereby you can mount a disk image as a drive - so I can have full access to the contents of the old hard disk when I need it, from the new machine.

Now I don't know about you, but I find it takes me weeks to get a new development machine up just how I like - and there always seems to be stuff I have forgotten off my old machine...

I was really excited to see that VMware Convertor has started to support Acronis True Image 9 disk images as a source for a conversion process.

This allowed me to convert the backup I had taken of my old machine prior to collection, and convert it to a VMware virtual machine.

After stepping through the wizard, this took about 2 hours to process the 56Gb image file and produce a 46Gb VMware disk image - I assume some compression must be used here???.

I then tried to load the virtual machine using the (excellent and also free) VMware player.

I did have a slight issue initially - due to the partitioning on my original Dell laptop, the C: drive was actually the second partition - and hence the boot.ini had to be modified to allow the virtual machine to boot correctly. (see this blog post for info on how this was fixed)

After fixing this, the virtual machine booted fine - and I could log in to my old machine - and once I had assigned 1.5 Gb of memory - the performance is quite acceptable - certainly good enough to allow me to continue working on the virtual machine until I have enough time to get the new one set up just right...

Very impressed with VMware - it seems faster than my old machine was - despite my new machine not being a huge amount faster...