I needed to convert a physical Windows XP Professional machine running ZENworks into a VMware virtual machine, but only after removing the unique identifiers like the Windows’ SID and ZENworks’ GUID, so that I could later make multiple copies of the VM without them all writing to the same ZENworks object. After weighing my options, I decided that it wouldn’t be practical to hot clone the physical machine. The best method would be to unregister the ZENworks object, uninstall the Adaptive Agent, pull it off the network, reinstall the Adaptive Agent, and then sysprep -reseal -shutdown the machine. This would leave me with a hard drive with a XP installation ready to generate new IDs the next time it was powered on. But as you well know, the VMware vCenter Converter Standalone app can only perform P2V hot cloning. Cold cloning requires the VMware Cold Clone Boot ISO, which is only available to VMware Converter Enterprise license-holders. After some Googling around, I came across this thing called, Multi-Operating system Administration.
Basically, it creates a LiveCD that runs the free VMware Converter on top of a Windows Server 2003 kernel. It’s very, very nice and developed by an obvious super-genius. Autodata Key Programming Manual on this page.
Just how cool is it? How about the ability to boot a physical box and start the originally installed system as a virtual machine? Here are the steps I took to build my free cold clone boot CD. Dune Buggy Blueprints Pdf Editor. Creating the cold clone boot CD This builds a LiveCD using Windows Server 2003 that can then run VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 3.0.3 (previously known as VMware Converter Starter Edition) in order to cold clone a hard drive. Caveats The version of Windows running in the LiveCD should be the same as, or later than, the version of the Windows machine you want to convert to a VM.
VMware Converter, free and safe download. VMware Converter latest version: A free Software utilities program for Windows. VMware Converter is a nice, free Windows. All Downloads Products. My Products; Products A-Z; By Category; en_US.