How do you copy a physical hard drive to a Vmware virtual hard disk?

You could use VMware vCenter Converter(free) or Paragon Go Virtual(free), both applications will convert your existing physical machines in to virtual machines.

I have only used VMware vCenter Converter with good results.

VMware (and I think most VM vendors) have "physical-to-virtual" conversion tools that should do the job. It's been a long time since I've tried them, but when I did I had no good luck (I'm sure that's probably not the case anymore - it's been a very long time).

However, if you find they don't work for you, you can do what I usually do - attach an empty virtual drive to an existing virtual machine and use Ghost or Acronis (or any other drive imaging software) to image the physical disk to the empty VM disk. This works great - just like if you wanted to copy a drive from one physical machine to another.

Sure is, you can make it an ISO and mount it on the system. Beware, that it will take up as much harddisk space as the drive it's a copy of, so you'll want to do this on another drive. There are far easier ways. For instance: Use "File->Import" on the Workstation to choose the harddrive as the source drive to mount.

1. Create a new Virtual machine based on linux.
2. Make the drive size equal to the drive to be imaged
3. Connect the drive to be imaged (USB/eSATA)
4. boot the VM off the diskcopy CD/ISO link text
5. Make a disk copy using external drive as Source and vDisk as Destination
6. Change VM settings as appropriate

You can use:

1. VMware vCenter Converter Standalone -- As suggested by most users but I wonder it may subject to licensing requirement for existing customer, tho you can still download it freely from official site.
2. VMware vCenter Converter cold clone boot CD -- Discontinued but you can find it here. http://thatcouldbeaproblem.com/?p=584
3. Microsoft SCVMM -- Sth for large scale and scheduled conversion.
4. Sysinternal Disk2VHD by Microsoft -- My personal fav and the easiest one. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx

PS. Only 2 allow you to have it done from "bare bone" level, most mehtods required agents to be installed in guest os which is going to be converted.

you can just 'dd' your /dev/hda or /dev/hda1 to a file. i.e. if you are on a linux box.

on Windows get a windows dd, and use \DosDevices\DriveC ( or something like that too lazy to look around).

easy.

Create a new virtual disk that is the size of the physical disk you want to copy.

on the Machines sidebar list in Vmware, go to settings, select the disk, map it to a drive letter on the host machine, use your favorite imaging software to copy the physical disk to the VM disk.

This is nice because it's a direct copy and does not require in image which would otherwise mean a third copy of the disk would be needed temporarily.

In VMWare Workstation, File->import supports a physical machine as the source

You can add a windows (samba) share on your hardware node, and go to it through your virtual node (\) to copy the files. Alternatively, you can use the network browsing feature to locate the files on the shared drive, and copy them.

You can attach a blank VMDK as a disk drive with SmartVDK and copy the files over to it.

If you want to preserve ACLs and all the NTFS metadata (make a perfect image,) use ImageX to capture an image of the physical disk. And then immediately apply the image to the attached virtual disk drive. You'll need enough space to have a complete backup of the source hard drive, though.