There are two basic approaches to disk copying.
To do a 'true' image, first
unmount the partition, then copy the partition itself, as opposed to the files in it. dd will do the job, but Partimage offers better disk space usage at the cost of only supporting some filesystems. I'm not sure if VMWare converter will support these.
An alternative approach is to copy all the files into an archive of some sort. This works very well for Linux, but doesn't always work out right for Windows partitions. In your example, you'd do
Code:
tar -cvzf /path/to/archive /hello/
options: c means
create an archive. v means be
vverbose - list every file that's archived, optional but most people use it. z means use g
zip compression. f means the loaction of the archive
file.
Then create a new virtual machine with a
new disk image, and boot it from a LiveCD. Access the archive file on the host from the LiveCD - how to do this depends on your virtual machine technology. Then
in the virtual machine, use (g/qt)parted to create a Linux partition, mount that partition on say /media/sda1, and do
Code:
tar -xvzf /path/to/archive /mnt/sda1/
or use a gui archive extractor. Then you'll need to install Grub or Lilo on the VM.
