Steve's Blog

Jan 6, 2018

How to convert a Physical Disk to a

VMware VMDK image
I was recently wanting to convert all of my old hard drives from old
computers to VMDKs so that I could run the drive virtually in
VMware, but I couldn’t �nd a way to do it so that’s why I’m writing
this now. Most other guides would use Disk2vhd and use Hyper-V
but most people don’t have a pro version of Windows to use that or
some guides would say to use VMware vCenter Converter but the
physical machine has to be running and I only have the hard drive
so I can’t use that. Then I found StarWind V2V Converter which can
convert a VHD (and VHDX) �le from Disk2vhd and that’s what this
guide is going to use.

Stu� to get beforehand

Download Disk2vhd and StarWind V2V Converter (or click this
link to download StarWind V2V Converter without giving your
info away).
Buy a SATA (or IDE) to USB adapter to easily connect the old
hard drive to your computer.

Steps
UPDATE
(12/05/2018): I’ve recently found Vmdk2Phys which is still in beta
(and doesn’t look the best) but is more straightforward then
following the guide below. Vmdk2Phys also supports converting
VMDKs to physical drives.

1. Open Disk2vhd and untick all volumes except the one you
want to virtualize and pick a location to output the �le to, then
click the ‘Create’ button. It will take a while to �nish depending
on the size and speed of your drive.
2. Once Disk2vhd �nishes open StarWind V2V Converter select
‘Local �le’ and click ‘Next >’ when it asks for the ‘Source image
location’

3. Select the ‘Source image’ then click ‘Next >’

4. Select the format you want to convert to (the 1st and 3rd
option are probably the most compatible option with VMware
Workstation Player)
5. Select the ‘Virtual disk type’ (Select the one most compatible
with the windows installation eg. IDE for Windows XP)

�. Set your destination �le location then click ‘Next >’

 7. Run the converted �le in VMware Workstation Player

Thanks for reading!

Steve.