If you are asking how to make an image of the virtual machine, it's amazingly simple. You drag/drop the .vmdk file onto your external storage.
The VMWare interface also has a tool to make snapshots of your virtual machines. These are much faster and smaller than trying to copy the entire VM over to a backup storage device, but I seldom use them unless I am experimenting with some sort of risky app/driver install and want an easy way to back it out.
If you were asking how to get a VM onto a thumbdrive, and then be able to boot from the thumb drive, VMWare isn't going to help you much. While I believe VMWare can probably boot a VM from USB storage, the VM image will not be able to boot by itself. You have to have the VMWare hypervisor running before a VM can boot.
[[If you are asking how to make an image of the virtual machine, it’s amazingly simple. You drag/drop the .vmdk file onto your external storage.]]
Cool- sounds simple enough
Yeah I was asking more for ‘reinstalling’ the working windows environment should something go wrong along the way- the reason for my wanting this is because of the extra layer of complexity added with the rollbackRX adding a protected partition, and it also hooks into boot somehow so that I can roll back system at boot incase of viruses etc- I’d need all that info transfered to a VM as well- My disk duplicator does this perfectly-
I’ll check out p2v programs- thanks for the suggestion
There’s an interesting looking program here that will convert a running windows installation to a VM it seems- Any thoughts on it?
Disk2vhd
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396
It does state however “Note: Virtual PC supports a maximum virtual disk size of 127GB. If you create a VHD from a larger disk it will not be accessible from a Virtual PC VM.”
My hard-drive is 1.5 terabyte- does this mean I will be able to copy it BUT not be able to use it in a VM?
Listen, I know you’re busy- and I won’t keep dragging htiso ut as it’s a very compelx thing for sure- but I ran across the following blurb about VMware converter which said it can convert a physical machine to a VM and it won’t be hardware dependent- but my concern would be that it could only then be run in a VM and can’t be actually ported from the VM to a new physical machine? Or can it? Like let’s say I had my main physical machine running windows 7- I convert it to a VM, and save it to a USB hard-drive- The physical machine fries- board no good, hard-drive shot etc- I get a new machine, format hard-drive, can I take the VM snapshot and port it over to the physical machine and have it run as though I had physically installed windows to the physical machine? Or would I only be able to run it in a virtual machine player?
[[Want to keep an old Windows or Linux installation around without keeping the hardware around? Convert that physical Windows partition to a virtual hard drive, allowing you to boot it in a virtual machine program like VMware, Hyper-V, Parallels, or VirtualBox.
Windows ties itself to your computer’s hardware. These tools will create a copy of a physical machine’s state and turn it into a virtual machine, allowing it to boot in the virtual machine program you prefer.]]
I like the idea of the quick snapshots, and all, but I run photoshop which is an intensive program and not sure it will run well in a virtual machine- if it did, I wouldn’t worry about running a VM on a Linux host system IF I could find a way that is easy to get files from the VM to the host- (I do photography, and need the windows and photoshop to do the processing- and then I would need to get the photos copied from the VM to the host computer system) Everything else practically I could do in Linux-