How To Copy A VMWare System To A Live Environment?

joplenmo

I have spent a lot of time and effort building a Gentoo system entirely from scratch following the guide and reading many helpful hints here on the forums. I've grown so happy with my virtual Gentoo environment I'd like to replicate that in a "live" environment - a.k.a. an actual computer system.

I've searched the forums but only found one brief mention of "copying a system" by tarballing the entire thing then untarring it onto another system but it didn't make any sense. So could someone please direct me to the information I need in order to duplicate my VMWare installation onto an actual computer system? I, of course, realize some changes will be necessary given hardware, but otherwise everything else will remain the same.

Thanks for any assistance/direction you can provide me. And please keep in mind that though I've built a Gentoo virtual system from scratch I'm still fairly new to the terminology. I've only proven one thing thus far - I'm capable of following directions very well (managed to get Gentoo installed and get a desktop environment up and running both on the first try as opposed to the many horror stories I've read on here).
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merlijn · Posted: Sat Oct 20, 2007 9:30 am Post subject:

There is several ways you can do this, ranging from quite easy to very advanced. Tarring your / and deploying that on a pc with different hardware can produce very weird things, so I wouldn't go with that method. For a not so experienced user I would recommend the following way to go:

- Install a fresh stage3 on the new pc according to the handbook / quick install guide. Only thing to note is that it is a good idea to add the same users to the system as you had in the vmware.
- Copy the important dirs from the vmware to your new machine. I would recommend these: /home/, /root/ (if you have anything in there), /etc/ and /var/lib/portage/world. Surely keep a backup of the vmware in case you missed out on anything.
- You will need to 'merge' the /etc dirs, you can copy all of the stuff that isn't there, but you probably want to edit /etc/make.conf and for example /etx/X11/xorg.conf on your new machine. This should pretty much take care of all the settings you had on your system.
- With your old world file in /var/lib/portage/world, you can reinstall all the packages you used to have. 'emerge -uevDN world' will do all the work, but prepare for a whole lot of hours heavy compiling.

After this you should probably want to add a whole bunch of programs to some runlevel, to be started on boot. Once you have done this, you should be all set. (Well anyway I can't help you much further from there now, you will probably need to fix a few things that don't work out of the box).

Hope this helps,
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NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Oct 20, 2007 10:04 am Post subject:

joplenmo,

The *.vmdk file in vmware is just a disk image in a file.
You can mount its partitions and copy the contents almost as you would any other partition.

You need to know the starting point of each partition within vmware, which fdisk -l (within your vmare install will tell you)
This example is from a real disk but the method is the same

joplenmo · Posted: Sat Oct 20, 2007 7:38 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the suggestions! I am going to give it an attempt this evening. For safety's sake I made a backup of the VMWare Gentoo installation and will work with copies of that installation in case I mess up.

Wish me luck!
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joplenmo · Posted: Mon Oct 22, 2007 9:21 pm Post subject:

It worked!

Took a few attempts and some patience, but I finally got the VMWare installation duplicated over to the desktop.

I created a backup archive of the VMWare installation (by booting from the Gentoo 2007.0 install disk image in VMWare and backing up the contents of the VMWare disk image that the installation resided on).

I then installed a clean copy of Gentoo onto my desktop computer using the Gentoo 2007.0 installation CD.

Then I exploded the backup over the new installation while I was still running the LiveCD version of Gentoo.

I had to then go in and alter/tweak a number of the config files, etc, but in the end I wound up with a desktop duplicate of the VMWare version of Gentoo I'd played with for the last year.

Thanks guys!
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