Turn your physical computer into a virtual one

Imagine you want your physical computer to run as a virtual machine, maybe because you want to try some dangerous changes, maybe because you want to sell one of your two laptops. That's what this article is about. Your computer can be on Windows or Linux, no matter.

How to

• Use a USB disk to store an image of your computer's hard disk:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/hdimage.img

This can be used if your harddisk is /dev/sda and you want your image file at /hdimage.img.

• Download and install vmWare on your host computer.
• use qemu-img from the qemu package to transform your harddisk image to a vmware image:

qemu-img /mnt/usb/hdimage.img -O vmdk /hdimage.vmdk

• you can now use your vmware image to boot your virtual guest computer.