Thinkpads Forum

Anyone use VMWare on their thinkpads? I'm thinking of making an image of another laptop and loading VMWare to effectively have my work laptop image running on my thinkpad.

I'm familiar with Vmware but not cloning existing OS into an existing OS.

Yes i use VMWare but i have never tried doing what you want to do.
But wouldnt it be much faster, easier and better to just copy the files you need. If you make a clone of the work laptop then you will begin to have different versions of your work machine as you work some of the time on the actual work machine and some of the time on the virtual work machine, unless you wanna "throw out" the actual work machine.

Something like the later. It's breaking my back to use two laptops and I would plan on just letting the other one sit. Not that I have anything against HP

Is it possible to use a ghost image to install onto VMware?

Yea I use VMWare. Don't think of it as a clone, you generally will install the OS just like you would on a PC. But you could then restore a backup or use migration software like AlohaBob. I suppose you could boot a Ghost floppy in VMWare 5 and use an image on the network, but I can't say I've ever tried that. VMWare's 'virtual hardware' support is pretty remarkable, but you'll have issues with your notebook drivers maybe to clean up. So long as that's not a hal/machine type issue you should be OK. Even if it is, VMWare's pretty well documented and has a lot of 'under the hood' stuff you can do; there may be a fix.

You've found a use for all that RAM, for sure!

I use Ghost. It's the best thing out there.

If I moved an image to another workstation - is there a way to strip out the HAL and have it redetect the hardware? In a previous win98 to winxp migration - i believe this is what we did.

You can use VMware to create a physical machine out of a virtual machine (but I have not done it). I'm not certain you can do it the other way, round. Take a look at VMware ACE to see if it helps. Another way may be to put the image on a second drive (Ghost, as has been suggested), and boot from it. If the disks are different licenses, it should work. ... JD Hurst

You've found a use for all that RAM, for sure!

Hey what can I say - two machines are better than one. I got the idea from a fellow engineer who did this exact same thing - except I haven't picked his brain on how he did it yet.

You do not mention what OS you want to clone, as cloning Linux is quite easy while cloning Windows is much harder (but not impossible). On Linux all you have to do is do a virtual boot on the physical drive in Vmware and select the OS you want from the GRUB list. That OS CAN be Windows (you just have to create a virtual profile) but you still need grub, and therefore a Linux installation, in order to access it. So you are still using your physical installation and it is also much faster than a virtual one.

Stavros

Shouldn't be too tough, really.

When you boot from your Ghost CD or floppy, the network location of your image can of course be your host computer.

I'd remove temporarily any drivers you know aren't appropriate before making the image.

If Windows then won't start with the blue screen 7B error, users have reported that fixing that in XP may be as simple as copying the correct hal file over. I've never had to try that yet so I can't vouch for it; but the big 3 you would be concerned with are of course hal.dll, halacpi.dll and halaacpi.dll. I'm pretty sure the VMware Virtual machine uses the latter.

Oh sorry - the image I'm trying to take is of a Win2k machine on an Hp and moving it to a vmware virtual host on a XP machine.

OK, 2K. Heck, if you swapped just your mainboard with 2K no guarantee it would boot up, much less all the hardware, LOL.

If it doesn't just work then time to read up on virtual machine config. There's plenty that can be configured thru the GUI plus some good old fashioned ini files.

I'm trying to remember the project that I worked on since it's been a couple of years now - we used a utility to tell windows to repeated guided setup to reinstall only the hardware abstraction layer and devices. Then we ghosted the image onto the network and booted to the network to get the image - on the next boot it would go to guided setup. But that was a 98 to XP migration. I'm wondering if there was a way to do it with win2k.

Ah well - if it's way to complicated - I should probably just ask the VMWare engineer how he did it. Let you know what I find out.

That would likely be 'Sysprep', you could use that. Look for tools\deploy.cab on your 2K CD.
If you used the Syspart method when you did that migration (likely if you were installing 2K on a variety of different hardware) then the image made at that time would likely be suitable as well.

syspart and sysprep. Got it.

Just talked to the engineer. He said that he used a tool called PEBuilder from nu2.nu to build an bootable CDROM which contained /i386 and Ghost 8 or 9. He then built an image of the OS and installed vmware. He said that the HAL layer wasn't an issue since vmware has hardware virtualization and that one needed to used an option toolkit called vmtools from vmware.

After that - two laptops running as one! I'll let you know how it goes.