South Africa is a mystical country. Most people - especially North Americans - think we are a 3rd world country, people live in shacks and lions roam the dirt roads.

But alas - today I will prove them all wrong. Show me where in the WORLD you can find divine human beings such as these two mythical healers - right here in Sandton in Johannesburg. I will show you their resumes as I cannot even begin to express their awesomeness in my layman vocabulary.

root@waldopc:/# time dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/backup/192.168.0.20.hdd bs=65536
15261915+1 records in
15261915+1 records out

1000204886016 bytes (1.0 TB) copied, 49638.9 s, 20.1 MB/s

That is... Almost 14 hours. Eish.

http://vimeo.com/14352658

So you want to get your Linux physical machine running inside a virtual machine under Parallels Desktop for Mac? The straight forward way would be to use Parallels Transporter Agent on the Linux machine, however for me under Ubuntu 10.04.1 x64 it caused the machine to forever hang at the "Gathering information" screen... And if you kill the agent then Ubuntu hangs and refuses to restart. I clearly needed a different tactic.

What I did to get my Ubuntu Linux 10.04.1 x64 running happily inside my new Parallels Desktop for Mac 6.0, was the following:

1. On the source Linux machine, as root dump the whole hard disk (not a partition - the WHOLE disk)

   dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/backup/192.168.0.1.hdd bs=65536 
   

   Obviously substitute /dev/sda for your primary hard drive you want to copy, and /mnt/backup/192.168.0.1.hdd for the destination file to be created. There needs to be sufficient free disk space on that target mount point to contain the source hard disk's capacity.

2. Copy the file /mnt/backup/192.168.0.1.hdd to a filesystem the Mac has access to, and that has 120% the free capacity of the hard disk image you are copying. Tip: If you use a USB2.0 drive and have more than a 200GB HDD, be prepared to wait a couple of days for the next process. eSata and FW800 are your friends.
3. On the Mac, create a new Virtual Machine. Select Hard Disk 1 as this .hdd file you made available to the Mac.
4. The system will ask you to convert the old format HDD file to the new format. Accept this choice.
5. Boot the VM.
6. Install Parallels Tools.
7. Reboot the VM.