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Virtual Disk Conversion
Converting virtual disks between VMware, Virtual PC, bochs, and any
other emulators is always an interesting problem. If the disk
structures are known or can be reverse engineered, it’s possible to
write a conversion utility. A much more generic way uses your favorite
floppy-based or run-on-CD Linux version (like Knoppix) and a network
connection for each real or virtual machine.
Assuming you’ve booted a small-footprint Linux on
either machine (real or virtual) and there is network connectivity
between them, you can transfer a disk image with a simple command pipe
like:
source# dd if=/dev/hda | ssh user@target dd of=/dev/hda
where source and target are the source and target (V)Ms and user is the remote account on the target host. For this to work, you’ll either have to allow ssh root logins or grant user
write permissions to /dev/hda. It’s not pretty either way, but we’re
not talking about making dangerous permanent changes on a production
box.
If you find that you do this a lot, there are certainly ways to
automate this procedure. It’s also possible to copy the images to a
central file server. Another possible improvement would be a transfer
protocol that transfers a sparse image, i.e. it skips disk sectors that
are zeroed out.
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