Migration issue.

[ReVeLaTeD]

Nobody has mentioned this issue, which leads me to believe nobody's actually done it.

Old computer was a Gateway P7805u with 320GB of hard drive space. New computer is a MBP 13" with I believe the same amount or slightly less. On the migration assistant I explicitly told it to only migrate the one partition that had the Windows 7 install and not the rest. This worked...but the problem is that VMWare essentially installed the hard drive at its full size, so I've got the one 60GB partition that's valid and over 200GB of unallocated space that no longer is. I need a way to change this behavior; I only want the main partition, the hard drive (mind, not the PARTITION, the drive itself) should be no more than 60GB. I cannot for the life of me see a way to change this although I know it must be possible, since it's essentially a driver.

GParted is for partition changes, not drive changes, so it doesn't work. Nothing I do seems to change it.

Does anyone have any ideas? It's really bothering me, and the only answers I see are "image from old VM to new VM", but the problem is that I really don't care to buy imaging software for something that should be built into VMWare. Surely the guys that created the migration assistant would have thought in advance that a user might feasibly want to migrate a single partition into a virtual disk.

[WoodyZ]

Normally I always clean build however I did try Migration Assistant one time just to see how it works and do not remember if there was a way to adjust HDD/Partition/Volumes/Sizes etc. although when I do need to do a P2V I use Ghost and have my own way of injecting the appropriate Drivers and Registry entries in order to accomplish the task as it only takes a fraction of the time compared to using the Migration Assistant or the Import command where applicable. If you want aggregate control you should use VMware vCenter Converter Standalone as I believe that the Migration Assistant is just a scaled down version of this and why you don't have as many choices.

BTW There are many ways to do Disk Cloning/Imaging that you don't have to go buy Ghost for and some are free. One of which is Clonezilla Live and have a look at: Comparison of disk cloning software

[ReVeLaTeD]

Here's the thing. The PC has already been cleaned. The VM is all I have.

I think I see where I should be able to change it but I never have. Under the hard disk setting is a size slider, however it won't let me change because it claims "Disk cleanup is recommended". If I run disk cleanup, nothing happens. It continues to recommend the cleanup. I can't get past it.

[WoodyZ]

Here's the thing. The PC has already been cleaned. The VM is all I have.

So, what difference does that make!? You can still do the same things to the Virtual Machine.

Forgot to add that once the virtual hard drive has a filesystem on it you cannot make it smaller via the Settings in Fusion only larger hence having to control it at its creation or use other methods.

Message was edited by: WoodyZ

[ReVeLaTeD]

The difference it makes is that your procedure assumes a P2V, which I'm translating as physical to virtual. That's not what I'm doing, because there is no physical. If there's something I'm missing here do let me know.

What I need is essentially an application that will say, "Where's your OS?" I point to it, it then says "where am I putting it?" I create a new virtual disk on the same VM that's sized the way I want it, and then the app just does the work and sets it up as the boot drive. Then I can remove the other disk entirely. That would also work. Or, if I can use VMware to migrate a partition to a new VM as a standalone install, that would be even better. But I need a way to do that outside of the VM. That's the challenge.

[WoodyZ]

I mentioned P2V simply as an example since you had done a P2V yourself and as far as V2V it's all applicable as well. You can use VMware vCenter Converter Standalone in a Virtual Machine as well as a Physical Machine.

As far as how to go about what needs to be done to achieve the end results you're looking for there no single application that I know of that has magic buttons to make the entire process as simple as "What I need is essentially an application that will say, "Where's your OS?" I point to it, it then says "where am I putting it?"" however the process really is rather simple when you understand all that is involved and have the various tools necessary to achieve the goal. The bottom line is basically and generally speaking there is no difference in the overall steps you'll need to take to accomplish this regardless of whether Physical or Virtual although doing it virtually is much easier once you grasp the fact that you have to do the same things to a Virtual Machine that you'd do to a Physical Machine under similar circumstances.

Probably the easiest thing for you would be to use VMware vCenter Converter Standalone however if I needed to V2V from a larger vHDD to a smaller vHDD I'd add a second vHDD of the same type and name, residing temporarily in a different location then the existing vHDD and then boot the VM with a Winows Live ISO Image and Ghost the vHDD's and then just swap then out manually after closing Fusion. In lieu of Ghost one could use Clonezilla.

Also note that these comments are meant to ge general statements and without knowing all the particulars of your situation only you can make the determination as to what is going to be the best way for you to accomplish the task at hand. Also I have to day so what if the drive is showing as "I've got the one 60GB partition that's valid and over 200GB of unallocated space that no longer is." as long as you have not preallocated the virtual hard drive the 200GB of unallocated space is only consuming a few MB of Host disk space and is negligible.

[ReVeLaTeD]

The VM is occupying 100GB of my total drive space. Considering the partition is still 60GB, I'd say that it nullifies your theory about how large the VM should be.

I'll look into Converter, but I don't find a Mac version - and obviously, if there isn't a Mac version, I'd have to do it from within the VM, which is what I wanted to avoid. Oh well.

[z_chris]

You should be able to download a free version of the converter. Here's a link to a video that shows how to properly import it to Fusion, it's old but it works for v3.

http://www.vmware.com/download/fusion/importer_tool.html

The video shows the whole migration process from taking an image of the pc (hot clone) to importing it to Fusion. Good luck.

[ReVeLaTeD]

Again, the problem is that the converter does not have a Mac version. The problem with Converter is that it won't work properly if you try to run it from the PC that you're trying to image. IT claims it can't create a snapshot. In fact, the only way I could even create the VM was to run VMWare Fusion from the Mac through Ethernet, and even that was a pain since it didn't do it properly.

I need a method that does NOT require the VM to be running or does not require me to run anything from within the VM. It has to work in Mac OS or it won't work at all.

[z_chris]

Hi,

Do you have fusion installed on the Mac? If you do then the link I provided should work and you are essentially doing a V2V but the advantage is that you will be able to shrink the partition on the vm since the Standalone converter is able to see the partition and how much spaced is used. I attached a screenshot from a vm that I ran the test from.

I haven't used the migration assistant but from what you did I guess it was not able to shrink the partition, but the standalone converter will def. allow you to change the partition size.

[ReVeLaTeD]

Those are the exact steps I did, and when it starts the conversion, it creates the new VM, then errors and says it can't create the snapshot. That happens every single time no matter what I do. It's only when I run it from outside of the OS that I'm converting that it works. Like in Parallels it did the same thing, but when I ran it from a Vista dual boot, it worked...I just couldn't import it afterwards, but it did at least create the image.

Something in Windows 7 is stopping the converters from imaging.

[WoodyZ]

If VMware vCenter Converter Standalone will not work for you then the fastest and easiest solution is to image one disk to another using Ghost or similar like Clonezilla and Clonezilla is free and works!

[ReVeLaTeD]

So to summarize what you both are saying in a yes/no statement (And hopefully someone from VMWare will open this thread and debunk this statement):

VMWare Fusion (read: no third party tools required) does not have the ability to look at a PC and/or VM'd machine and simply pull a single partition space into a virtual disk...it always must pull the entire physical disk, even if you tell it to only pull a single partition?

[WoodyZ · Accepted solution]

If you used the Migrate Your PC... command from VMware Fusion 3 and the accompanying VMware Fusion PC Migration Agent you have no aggregate control over migrating a given partition and the entire hard drive will be imported regardless of how it is partitioned!

Now if you want anything different then you need to use VMware vCenter Converter Standalone or Disk Imaging Software!

If you cannot get VMware vCenter Converter Standalone to work either on a Physical or Virtual Machine and you've already create a Virtual Machine using the the Migrate Your PC... command from VMware Fusion 3 then you'll need to either use Disk Imaging Software like Ghost or similar like Clonezilla or use another alternate method to clone the disk of which there are other ways to accomplish however would require more steps then just using the disk imaging software previously mentioned.

What don't you get or understand?

[ReVeLaTeD]

What I don't understand is why such a feature is absence from VMWare Fusion. What's the value in not offering this as a feature inside Fusion, especially since apparently Converter is not Windows 7 friendly? A bigger question would be, what if a person wanted to convert a dual boot scenario into two separate VMs during migration? Say if I've got XP on one partition and 7 on the other...is it not logical that a person might feasibly want to separate those into two distinct VMs? It's baffling that such a simple process was ignored by the developers.

In any case, the answer is "no", which though troubling, does answer my question.

[WoodyZ]

VMware Fusion is considered a consumer orientated product and base on over 20 years in IT I'd say that having a dual boot PC is not the consumer norm and its an atypical scenario especially for Mac users including Windows users that have switched to Mac. At this point in Fusion's development and all the real issues that need to be resolved I don't see your scenarios as a priority in the Fusion development cycle but maybe in time it will include such bells and whistles that you might want/need but for now it doesn't.

Also in general not every product has all the bells and whistles that a user might want/need regardless of whether or not the developers are or are not aware of all case use scenarios and this is just how it is... so the bottom line is one just needs to make use of all the different tools available to achieve the goal and in the time that's been wasted on this thread you probably could have corrected the issue you presently have by using Clonezilla and would have been done with it and on to the next thing.

You know if you don't understand the mechanics involved all you have to do is ask for more specific help and I'm sure the it will be given.

[ReVeLaTeD]

I would go out on a limb and say that most that would consider VMWare Fusion at all are not standard consumers, they're guys/gals smart enough to have dual booted, and thus might consider a migration path that you would consider atypical. Most consumers are deer-in-headlights at the mere mention of "VMWare". Given that I've lived through nearly the complete evolution of what we know of as Apple, I would go even further in saying that the one thing Mac users coming from PC need, is an outlet to continue offering what PC has always offered: flexibility, something Mac often fails in.

That said I fixed the problem. I'm actually more disappointed that nobody else caught this. While I was forced to use a Ghost image to get the drive to cooperate, the problem is with VMWare Converter...or more specifically, "VMWare vCenter Converter" versus "VMWare Converter Standalone". Apparently the former is version 4 while the latter is version 3. While they appear at a glance to be identical in presentation except for the server instance, Version 4 is essentially broken, it's what I was trying to use and it was what kept throwing the snapshot error, while version 3 ran through it with no issues under the exact same circumstances. It took two physical machines and two VMs to get it done, but I got it done.

Once it was finished I realized what I started with and that's when I realized my true error. I was only able to virtualize the darn thing in the first place thanks to Parallels Transporter Agent which worked with no errors when VMWare kept conking out. So I went ahead and converted it back to a Parallels VM, which saved 30% HDD space, and it's running happily. No sysprep errors (which vCenter Converter kept throwing), no snapshot errors, no oversized disks, nothing. I spent days trying to fight against going to Parallels because I use VMWare successfully on Windows, and it works great there...and running VMs works fine on Mac, but trying to do any conversions or anything is just a pain.

I appreciate your suggestions...but at the end of the day, it wasn't what I needed to get the job done. I needed to know that the Converter is essentially broken and that VMWare doesn't want to provide any advanced conversion options. Then I wouldn't have wasted the time.