Converting virtual Gentoo install to physical machine

JustinH · n00b Joined: 28 Jul 2006 Posts: 9

While at work as an IT intern, I was bored with nothing to do. Over the past couple of days I have been installing Gentoo in VMWare Server (the free one) and it happened. I managed to do a Gentoo install and get KDE to install properly! As you can probably imagine, I am very excited right now, this probably chaulks me up to the 7th install of Gentoo I've attempted.

What I would absolutely love to do is go and take the virtual machine I've created, and possibly find a way to put it on a physical hard drive I could boot off my machine at home. If you guys know of anything that would be awesome. Or if worse comes to worse is there anyway to install VMWare Tools to boost performance?

Justin

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2008 6:43 pm Post subject:

JustinH,

You can tar up the vmware server install, just like an install on a real hard drive, then untar the tarball in a new location.
As you will not have the hardware that vmware server prentends to have, you will need to redo the kernel to suit the installs new home, install grub to the MBR and fix grub.conf and /etc/fstab.

This process is called a stage4 and is well documented on the forums.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

ali3nx · Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2008 8:23 pm Post subject:

see the following url. skip to the bottom for at a portable backup solution

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=5161245

JustinH · n00b Joined: 28 Jul 2006 Posts: 9

Thanks alot guys!

I'm really aggravated right now. This virtual machine (which was my mistake from the beginning) was running under Vista. So it crashed and I had to hard reboot it. That caused the virtual machine config file to get corrupted and loose all settings. I think I may have to reinstall grub as it appears all the files are still in tact. I'll find out when I go back to work tomorrow.

Thanks again everyone!

Justin

Kaste · Posted: Sat Jul 26, 2008 7:05 pm Post subject:

How far were you in the install? If you can't revive the install try on the actual system and post for help if you need it. I'd always go for a clean start, although i can really understand you if had that much trouble. Trust me though i really don't understand anymore where i went wrong the first few times that didn't work and everything has been easy once i got it working once.
I really congratulate you for your persistence.
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I'm a membar of Mesnar and me scull contains wakky secrets!

JustinH · n00b Joined: 28 Jul 2006 Posts: 9

I was all the way through the install, had Kde working for the first time along with most of gnome done compiling. Ah well, probably just start all over with tomorrow.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Jul 27, 2008 11:53 am Post subject:

JustinH,

You can still unpick the pieces, there are a few more steps now.
Boot a liveCD that has NTFS support. Read only is fine
mount the broken ntfs partition somewhere so you can see its contents
Copy your virtual machine file somewhere or, as its a disk image in a file, loopback mount its individual partitions
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

JustinH · n00b Joined: 28 Jul 2006 Posts: 9

I suppose it would be better for my "education" in linux and virtual machines if I did actuall finish this project. Seeing as everything is on a work pc, I'll bring everything home tomorrow on my external hard drive. Thanks for all the help guys!