How to convert laptop drive for use as VMware image?

"With your hard drive plugged in via USB, you should be able to create an image of the hard drive as a VMDK file for use by a VMware Virtual Machine. T

If VMware Converter running on an OS with this disk attached cannot do it, you may be able to find a free converter out there (see link below) to convert a disk with a NTFS, Fat32, or other filesystem to a VMDK file.

You would create a new Virtual Machine with the same operating system as the same type installed on your previous laptop. This will create a Virtual Machine that you can add a virtual hard drive(VMDK) to (in this case you would point the Virtual Machine to the VMDK file you created via ""Edit Settings"" on the VM).

Try searching and/or asking on the VMware Communities: http://communities.vmware.com/ usually you will get a quick response, or find a post from someone who has done the same thing.

Good Luck!

-bn"

Another tool (paid though) is Image for Windows suite, which includes a script for P2V specifically for VMware, from a physical hard drive or an image backup. Link: www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=434
Another tool (paid though) is Image for Windows suite, which includes a script for P2V specifically for VMware, from a physical hard drive or an image backup. Link: www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=434

"Another answer (works as of 2017 and uses free and easily found tools only) -

Create a VM with a hard drive (VMDK) and install something on it, or copy any existing VM - just enough that the VM has had its disk used.
Use any tool to mount the entire disk as a disk on Windows (or whatever system you are using). Note that VMWare's ""Map disk"" and similar may NOT work - you need to map the entire disk as a device, not just one volume, in case partitions need altering. What I did was convert the VMDK to VHD using Starwind's free V2V tool, because Windows allows mounting of VHD as a disk natively. Then I mounted the VHD device as a disk using Windows Disk Management or Diskpart.
Use the tool of your choice to copy the hard drive you want to virtualise, to the mounted virtual disk (VHD in my case).
Unmount the virtual disk/VHD and if needed use V2V to convert it back to VMDK.
Replace the original VMDK in your VM with the new VMDK.
If needed modify the VMX file to add or remove the firmware=""efi"" line to match the source system, or else it won't boot.
Fire up your VM and let it discover the new devices, and done.

Alternatively and equivalent:

Create a .VHD (Windows virtual disk) and mount it using diskpart or disk management.
Copy your HDD onto the VHD
Unmount the VHD
Use Starwind's free V2V to.convert it to a VMDK
Overwrite an existing VMDK in a VMware VM with it.
Check that the vmx file contains (or doesn't contain) the firmware=""efi"" line to match the source system, or else it won't boot.

What's nice about this is that inherently, it should pretty much always work and it's versatile and transparent. It also let's you modify the system as you would any hard disk before converting it back to VMDK."

Do you want to boot it, or just access the data? if its the latter, plug it into a USB drive caddy, image it with tools already in OS X, and access it as a disk image - i did a similar thing for a client, though using windows based tools - and OS X has most of what you need baked in - I'm not a mac user, but disc utility would likely do what you need if its a simple data recovery you need.