Copy VDI to physical partition

[dzenanz]

Hi all,

is it possible to copy virtual disk onto a physical one (physical partition)? I have working Fedora13 system with some software installed on a virtual disk, and I would like to set it up into a partition on my physical disk. Is this possible and worth the trouble (takes less time than installing and configuring new Fedora, and installing a few special libraries)? If yes, how?

The reason I want to do this is that nVidia's CUDA does not work in VM, and I would like to have a clean system for testing my software.

Regards,
Dženan

[mpack]

It's easy if you have the right software. Search for Ghost, Acronis, CloneZilla etc. dd will no doubt be mentioned, but IMHO it should be considered very much a last resort.

[dzenanz]

Thanks for the suggestion, it is a good idea.

But CloneZilla only supports VMware's format, so I would have to convert to it first, and this all leads to more hassle than just doing the whole installation in a normal way. Other packages do not seem to support VM disk images.

[mpack]

But CloneZilla only supports VMware's format

If CloneZilla supports any individual VM platform hdd format then I was not aware of it. That was not my suggestion.

My suggestion is that you run the disk imaging tool of your choice from inside a VM, imaging the VMs hard drive and writing the image file to a shared folder or USB external drive. You then go to your intended target PC, boot up the live CD version of the same disk imaging tool, and "restore" the image onto that PC's hard drive. In other words, do exactly what you would do to migrate an image between two physical PCs.