On Tue, 2005-07-05 at 12:48 -0400, Ryan D'Baisse wrote: > Just curious... > > How feasible do you think it would be to pull the contents from a > VMWare virtual drive onto a physical drive and have it function > properly? I have a development VM that I use with FC4 and it works > perfectly. So the FC4 is running on the guest VM? > All of my apps and settings are just right. It would be great to be > able to pull that VM out of VMWare and make it live. Did something like this, just for an experiment, with both host and guest running different Linux versions. Would also work on a target machine for the "clone" of FC4 that is already running some flavor of Linux, or using a live CD distro, as long as the machines are networked. Goes something like this (Fair warning - many gory details omitted for generality and brevity.): 1. Make partitions on the target for FC4, say /, /boot, and swap for example. 2. Run mke2fs on / and /boot partitions and mkswap on swap partition. 3. Mount the to-be-/ at a convenient location, say /fc4 4. Run "mkdir /fc4/boot" and mount to-be-/boot there. 5. Put /fc4 and /fc4/boot in /etc/exports on the target with permissions for the VM to mount. Do "exportfs -a". 6. Mount the partitions with NFS in the VM. Mountpoint /fc4 would be a nice choice for consistency, so you would have /fc4 and /fc4/boot NFS- mounted on the VM. 7. On the VM, "cp -au /boot /fc4/" and "cp -aux /boot /fc4/". 8. On either target machine or VM, edit /fc4/etc/fstab to correct devices for the target machine, ditto for /fc4/etc/mtab and remove all but the first 2 lines. May also need to change hostname and IP address in /fc4/etc/sysconfig/... 9. On the target machine, put appropriate boot stanzas from /fc4/boot/grub/grub.conf in /boot/grub/grub.conf. May need to create a new initrd, depending on the target hardware. 10. Cross fingers and reboot choosing FC4 clone entries. Will need to boot in runlevel 3 and run system-config-display to create a new /etc/X11/xorg.conf. > Like I said, just curious. I'm still a newbie, so I was wondering how > difficult it would be. Very likely more trouble than it's worth, but you might learn a lot. Another possible approach would be to try g4u. Most/all of the same manual configuration corrections would still be required. Probably better to do a fresh FC4 install and copy over settings and possibly user files from the VM FC4 install.
