I used a variation of this method to transfer an ubuntu desktop installation which was being used more as a server than anything. As there were other partitions on the drive that I didn't want transferred I used the command: dd conv=noerror if=/dev/sda1 bs=4096 |gzip |nc {IP ADDR OF VM} {PORT} nc -l -p {PORT} | gzip -dc dd bs=4096 of=/dev/sda1 I then transferred the boot sector with the command: dd if=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 |nc {IP ADDR OF VM} {PORT} nc -l {PORT} |dd bs=512 count=1 of=/dev/sda For reasons unknown to me, while it successfully copied over the entire filesystem, it didnt boot. The other thing which was odd was that it actually recreated the full paritition table from the old machine (which I thought was located somewhere between the boot sector and the first partition). While everything had copied, Gparted showed the entire virtual drive as unallocated, which was no small concern. To get it to boot I just reinstalled the grub bootloader by booting a live CD in the VM and typing: sudo grub root (hd0,0) setup (hd0) After that it booted fine - I didn't do the kudzu or mkinitfd as I had troubles with the ubuntu equivalent and the chrooted environment. It booted fine in the VM except for all its complaints about missing partitions. Deleting the non-existent paritions in FDISK and re-saving fixed the 'unallocated' parition and everything now appears fine. Now if I can just get it to recognise more than 640x480... Thanks for the How-To.

For general usage this tutorial is very good. Actually is a general tutorial for cloning a HDD with Linux installed.

 But if you care about the following things, the above steps are not enough:

1) The physical HDD can be large (250, 500, 750 or 1000 GB) and the Linux partition can be only 20-30 GB. Or some percentage of HDD space can be unpartitioned for later usage. Applying the tutorial ALL the source HDD will be coppied to the destination HDD (the virtual one).

2) The file systems in partitions from the physical HDD can be only 50% or less utilized so is very inefficient to clone the whole FS in the virtual HDD.

Among the above written steps I used some solutions to use in the VM as little space as possible:
A. Reduce the source FS and the device it sits on (partition or logical volume)
B. Copy the HDD without the unpartitioned space

Along with A. and B., we can use some tricks that can make this faster:
- http://tipstricksandmore.blogspot.com/2009/01/after-converting-physical-rhel4-system.html
- http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=1002402&sliceId=2&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&dialogID=14730726&stateId=0%200%204678181
- http://bisqwit.iki.fi/source/lvm2defrag.html
- usage of dd over the network with compression (good especially for empty spaces) and 4k IO size (faster than default IO size): dd bs=4096 if=/dev/sda | gzip | ssh root@destination_hostname "gzip -dc | dd bs=4096 of=/dev/sda"
- clone the MBR (1st soltion): dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
- clone the MBR (1st soltion): sfdisk -d /dev/sda | sfdisk -f /dev/sdb (over the network you can use sfdisk -d /dev/sda |  ssh root@destination_hostname "sfdisk -f /dev/sdb")
- modify destination hostname and network settings (RHEL and Fedora):
1. check name: (C) uname -n; (C) hostname -a
2. edit /etc/hosts
3. edit /etc/sysconfig/network
4. edit /etc/sysctl.conf
5. reboot (or echo hostname.mydomain.com > /proc/sys/kernel/hostname)
6. edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 eth1 ...
7. restart network service or computer

Have fun :)

I'm trying to execute these commands but am told that /dev/hda is read-only.  It is, after all, the cdrom.  My target vm has SDA and SDA2 (largest drive space) after booting with Knoppix.  Should I be using these instead?

:)

I am looking for something like this for (k)ubuntu.

Does this also work for (k)ubuntu Since I really need to virtualize my physical kubuntu machine

Thanks in advance

smart use of netcat here,

great tutorial... thanks for sharing it!

Great tutorial. thx

Sam