Today, I was creative and restored a VMware .VMDK via WinImage to a Physical Hard Drive, connected the Drive in a PC, and watched it boot to install windows XP.
The procedure go’s like this.
You will need WinImage ( demo )
1. Make a VMware Virtual Machine, ( I started a dos setup of Windows XP, and powered off after the 1st reboot. )
2. Connect drive via SATA/ IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter
3. Open WinImage and go to Disk, click on Restore Virtual Harddisk Image on physical drive
4. Check include non removable hard disks.
5. select disk
6. Change file type to VMDK, and browse to .vmdk file location and click ok.
7. Safely remove device, and connect to detonation pc, and power on.
Things to test
1. Can we remove VMware tools from any Existing VM image, and boot it on any Workstation / Server hardware?
Things to Explain.
1. A Dos install of Windows XP, which basically is copying your i386 directory from you windows CD, to a share, and booting with a 98 boot disk, fdisking, and formatting the local drive. Then rebooting with a network bootdisk , going into the share’s i386 directory, and running winnt.exe ( more on this at some point )
Either way, This allowed me to get Windows installed on a device, that didn’t like boot disks or DVD / CDROM’s.
Please post any comments.
