I virtualized a physical Redhat 7.3 to vSphere. I didn't resize partitions though. I did mine simply with cloning with Acronis. Worse that I had to do was rewrite grub wich takes less then 60 seconds...But that may have been due to my source had a few bad sectors. -Jeff <div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 7:19 AM, Karl Auer <<a href="mailto:kauer@biplane.com.au">kauer@biplane.com.au</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"> Hi there. A few weeks ago I was asking questions about virtualising an existing Linux system, so that it could run under, for example, VirtualBox. A few people gave me good pointers, and today I finally got my old server virtualised. The process was somewhat complexificated by me first having to resize a partition on the source machine. Anyway, the info from people here regarding gparted was invaluable (BTW, I resized from 80GB down to 10GB in one step and it worked fine). This page was the key to actually doing the virtualisation: <a href="http://www.localizingjapan.com/blog/2011/03/05/virtualizing-a-linux-system-creating-a-linux-vm-p2v/" target="_blank">http://www.localizingjapan.com/blog/2011/03/05/virtualizing-a-linux-system-creating-a-linux-vm-p2v/</a> A few notes though: - I didn't use partimage, I used dd to take images of partitions, and to write them back. partimage might have been faster, I don't know. I did try to use partimage, but apparently it *requires* a compressed image. Mine was raw, and partimage coredumped when fed it. - I was virtualising a 7.04 system, so grub (as per that link above) was the way to go. It may be that if you are virtualising other systems, you might have to handle the boot loader differently. - next time, I will run shredder or something over the partitions, so that empty blocks are filled with a pattern. This would allow good compression. As it was, the empty blocks still had the remnants of whatever data had been in them last, so the partition images did not compress well. - the job is not quite finished, but so far no showstoppers. Regards, K. -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Karl Auer (<a href="mailto:kauer@biplane.com.au">kauer@biplane.com.au</a>) <a href="tel:%2B61-2-64957160" value="+61264957160">+61-2-64957160</a> (h) <a href="http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer/" target="_blank">http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer/</a> <a href="tel:%2B61-428-957160" value="+61428957160">+61-428-957160</a> (mob) GPG fingerprint: DA41 51B1 1481 16E1 F7E2 B2E9 3007 14ED 5736 F687 Old fingerprint: B386 7819 B227 2961 8301 C5A9 2EBC 754B CD97 0156 -- ubuntu-users mailing list <a href="mailto:ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com">ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com</a> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users" target="_blank">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users</a> </blockquote></div>