On Mon, 1 Jun 2009, Randall R Schulz wrote:-
On Monday June 1 2009, Greg Freemyer wrote:
Never tried, but I'd be very surprised if a simple dd did not do the trick.
dd if=<virtual-drive-file> of=/dev/sdx
That certainly won't work. VMware virtual disk files are not simple byte-for-byte images of the virtual disk's contents.
That's true for an expanding disc image but, looking at a hex dump of the first 512 bytes of a pre-allocated disc image, it looks like it would for the pre-allocated images. It would also appear to work for pre-allocated Virtualbox disc images as well, however you'd need to skip the first 33280 bytes. To do this, you'd need to set a block size of 512 and use "skip=65" to skip over the extra data. As for writing the expandable disc images to a physical device, you'll probably need to create a pre-allocated disc image to match the size of the expandable disc image and then use dd to copy the discs inside the virtual machine, before being able to copy as you would with a pre-allocated disc image. There may be a tool available that can convert from an expandable to a pre-allocated disc image, either for VMware or Virtualbox, but I don't know of one. Having used Parallels in the past, I know it has such a tool for working with its own disc images. I have a vague recollection that it may be able to handle VMware disc images, but can't be certain about that. Regards, David Bolt -- Team Acorn: http://www.distributed.net/ OGR-NG @ ~100Mnodes RC5-72 @ ~1Mkeys/s openSUSE 10.3 32b | openSUSE 11.0 32b | | openSUSE 10.3 64b | openSUSE 11.0 64b | openSUSE 11.1 64b | RISC OS 3.6 | RISC OS 3.11 | openSUSE 11.1 PPC | TOS 4.02 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org