I am about to reinstal my OS and want to first 'image' the old setup and then
put that back in a virtual disk.



Currently (physical) disk one has 2 partitions, disk two has just the one
partition, and I have a USB hdd attached which is used by a program so needs
to stay 'attached' in some way.

So I would like to know whether, after setting up a virtual machine, the
virtual disk can be partitioned. If it is not possible in VirtualPC, is it
in other virtualisation progs?
Then after creating a partition can I load the image file for each
partition? Are there restrictions on which imaging progs can be used?

On Sun, 22 Feb 2009 12:59:00 -0800, davidsoap
<davidsoap@xxxxxx> wrote:

>I am about to reinstal my OS and want to first 'image' the old setup and then
>put that back in a virtual disk.
>
>Currently (physical) disk one has 2 partitions, disk two has just the one
>partition, and I have a USB hdd attached which is used by a program so needs
>to stay 'attached' in some way.
>
>So I would like to know whether, after setting up a virtual machine, the
>virtual disk can be partitioned. If it is not possible in VirtualPC, is it
>in other virtualisation progs?
>Then after creating a partition can I load the image file for each
>partition? Are there restrictions on which imaging progs can be used?

Avirtual machine acts exactly like a physical machine in regards to
most of the actions you can think up. This includes the handling of
disks, which in this case are VHD files on the *host* but real IDE
connected disks as seen from the VPC guest.

So given the right didk tools, yes you can create as many partitions
on the virtual disk as you can a physical disk.
Reading back a disk image onto the virtual disk is also the same as on
a physical disk, use whatever imaging program you normally do.

Physical-to-virtual (aka P2V):
------------------------------
However, don't expect the guest operating system to be in a runnable
state if you image the boot drive of your physical computer onto the
virtual boot drive of your virtual machine!
The hardware you see on the physical machine will *not* match the
emulated environment in the virtual machine and therefore you will at
the very least have to do a repair install (if we are talking about
Windows as the operating system) to make it work. You will also have
to get a separate Windows license to be legal.

Any USB device you have installed drivers for will be inaccessible in
the guest because it does not have USB. Etc, etc.

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)