MakeVM 1.6.5 is a System Maintenance product from sysdevsoftware.com, get 5 Stars SoftSea Rating, Create your own/edit existing Virtual Machine to play with VMWare (R) Player or other compatible virtualization software.
Manage your virtual hardware settings, set new virtual hardware, including new virtual disks and attach hard disks to VMWare virtual machine. With MakeVM you may even attach your USB flash drives as physical disks for virtual machine that is not works with VMWare virtual machine management software.
The software provides you with universal virtual disk conversion engine, as well disk clonning engine. With MakeVM you can:
* Clone your Real OS to VMWare, VirtualPC or Parallels Workstation;
* Clone your Virtual OS between virtualization program of different Vendors;
With its advanced 'Clone...' feature you may:
* Clone your physical hard drive (including USB drives) to VMWare .VMDK, Virtual PC .VHD or Parallels Workstation .HDD to make it to be a virtual disk for Virtual Machine; this feature includes real Operation System transfer to virtual machine (see notice below);
* MS Virtual PC, VMWare and Parallels Workstation sparse disks conversion from one format to another (their flat disk are compatible);
* FLAT disks to variable size (extensible, sparse) conversion (supports RAW, VMWare, VirtualPC, Parallels flat disks as source);
* Variable size VMWare, VirtualPC and Parallels Workstation disks compacting: if you have many files deleted, MakeVM allows you to clone your sparse disk to new one and skip unallocated disk space to make it much smaller; this feature works with FAT32 and NTFS file systems;
* This feature involves file system-level optimization, so may work much better than 'standard' compacting tools
* Combine all features above into single 'conversion' process.
* With 'Deirect clone...' feature you may just convert one sparse disk format to another with no processing (VHD/VMDK/HDD to VHD/VMDK/HDD).
* 'Deirect clone...' feature also supports VMWare sparse disk sets (created with 'Split disk...' VMWare feature) to convert to spanned sparse VMWare disk or Parallels Workstation virtual disk. 'Custom clone' does not support 'sparse disk sets'.
* Write support for VMWare sparse disk sets (2GB max. extents), allows you to convert monolithic VMDK (or other virtual disk types) to set of VMWare 2GB maximum size extents.
Key features:
1. Customize virtual hardware for existing virtual machine;
2. Create new virtual machine;
3. Create hard disk images;
4. Attach any physical disk (even USB flash drive) to virtual machine;
5. Variable size virtual disks of Virtual PC, VMWare and Parallels Workstation compacting by skipping unallocated disk space (NTFS and FAT32 only);
6. Clone physical hard disk to Virtual PC, VMWare or Parallels Workstation virtual disks; you may select partitions to clone;
7. Clone MS Virtual PC, Parallels Workstation, WMWare virtual disks to MS Virtual PC, VMWare or Parallels Workstation virtual disks; also you may select partitions to clone;
8. Virtual machines, created with MakeVM could be played with VMWare (R) Player, as well as MakeVM can customize virtual machine, designed for VMWare (R) virtualiztion software.
IMPORTANT:
* Real OS Transfer
MakeVM does not modify files on disk when it is clonned/converted, including no clonned OS drivers modification.
* VMWare products perform hardware emulation, basing on Intel(R) 440BX-like virtual motherboard.
Hardware-dependant operation systems (like MS Windows) may not start properly on such hardware if are clonned from installtions, based on very modern physical hardware.
* Thus, you have to be ready to 'repare' such clonned OS with 'Upgrade'/'Recover' re-installtion mode (this will keep you OS working 'as usual' with no settings/programs loss).
Operation systems, like Linux or BSD should start from clonned drive with no any problems.
* Virtual disks conversion
If your virtual disk contains some guest OS, it is possible it will get boot problems within new virtualiztion environment.
You have good chance to transfer OS with no modifications from Virtual PC/Parallels Workstation to VMWare, whilst with reverse transfer, especially transfer to Parallels Workstation you have high probability of boot problems.
Parallels Workstation now has 'too old hardware' emulated, so you may have similar problems like with real OS transfer.
To override boot problems, be ready to make system repairment after OS transfer.
* Disk cloning: MS Virtual PC users
Microsoft Virtualization products that use Connectix virtual disk format (.vhd) are limited to use virtual disks only below 127.5Gb virtual size. Because of this limit you can not fully clone to VHD format any virtual disk of other virtualization product or real physical disk over 127.5Gb. If this limit is exceeded, MakeVM truncates VHD file, thus no data over this 127.5Gb limit will be copied. If your source disk is larger, either be sure no data overlaps this limit or consider using of different virtualization product (like VMWare Player). The license of this windows utility software is Free Trial Software, the price is $19.95, you can free download and get a free trial before you buy. If you want to get a full or nolimited version of MakeVM, you can buy this windows utility software.