Virtual PC – Moving Physical PC into virtual environment

I've been doing P2V conversions with Vmware converter and V2P conversions (with Acronis True Image) for two years.It works, even if Vmware Converter is kind of slow and Acronis often makes the resulting system unbootable because of the grub and because the partitions are wrongly mapped in /etc/fstab (so you have to boot with an bootable linux and fix grub and /etc/fstab). There is no easy solution for P2V conversion because the devices can get wrongly mapped in the new setup. Exactly in this point Vmware Converter does a great job,even if it sometimes fails for stupid reasons (if you have partitions greater than 100 GB, there are chances the conversion will fail because formating 100 GB takes a long time and the Converter takes a period of longer then 5 minutes without output as a sign of failure).

First, create a raw image of the required size. I'll assume 10G is enough. Using seek creates a sparse file, which saves space.

dd if=/dev/null of=example.img bs=1M seek=10240

Next, create a filesystem on it.

mkfs.ext4 -F example.img

(Note that you need the -F option for mkfs.ext4 to operate on a file as opposed to a disk partition)

Then, mount it.

mkdir /mnt/example
mount -t ext4 -o loop example.img /mnt/example

Now you can copy your files to /mnt/example. Once this is done, unmount it and you can use example.img as a drive in a virtual machine. If you want you can convert it from a raw image to another format like qcow2e using qemu-img, but this isn't required.