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Raw Image to VMDK… the Easy Way

January 7th, 2008 by peasleer

In my last post I chronicled the time consuming process of converting an image produced using the Unix dd utility to a vmware VMDK virtual disk. The process does work, but VMWare will only load it if the image contains a master boot record that still contains the appropriate information when removed from the rest of the system. Additionally, I think it is appropriate to mention again how terribly slow it is. We can circumvent these problems with Live View for Windows, a program developed for forensic work by Carnegie Mellon University.

The process for creating the image with dd is the same as last time, IE, by doing something along the lines of:


dd if=/dev/hdc3 of=/mnt/external/diskImage/XPSP2.img bs=1024

Once that image is generated and you are back in Windows, simply launch the Live View utility and… the rest is pretty self explanatory. Once the dd image is generated, the Live View program takes only a couple minutes to create the new vmdk, configure the virtual machine, and launch it. Sweet, sweet efficiency!

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   Post in Linux, Miscellaneous, Sysadmin, Windows, virtualization   

4 Responses to “Raw Image to VMDK… the Easy Way”

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  1. 1 Guillermo

    Thank you for introducing me to Live View. There is a problem with the previous article that you referenced. You suggested the following command.

    dd if=/dev/hdc3 of=/mnt/external/diskImage/XPSP2.img bs=1024

    Depending on the situation (excluding drives with multiple boot partitions) Live View seems to like taking a DD of the whole drive.

    dd if=/dev/hdc of=/mnt/external/diskImage/XPSP2.img bs=1024

    Just posting my experience.

    Sep 11th, 2008 at 2:05 pm   

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