Neal Waterstreet

  • Home
  • About
  • Book Reviews
    • 2018 Reading List
    • 2017 Reading List
    • 2016 Reading List
    • 2015 Reading List
    • 2014 Reading List
    • 2013 Reading List
  • Projects
    • OBi200
    • DS716+ memory upgrade
    • Cord cutting
  • Presentations
  • Contact

Virtualize a broken laptop drive

March 18, 2012 by neal Leave a Comment

I recently had a Toshiba laptop that was no longer able to power on. I had always had trouble with the power connections on the machine and now it was no longer able to charge at all. I did not want to spend any money fixing it since it was old and out of warranty. The only problem was that I did need some of the data on the drive. I may post some of the issues that I had with this laptop, but that is for another story.

I had been working with VMware for a while at work and I figured I would give it a shot.

First, I bought a hard drive enclosure to house the drive. It was inexpensive and I needed to move the drive to the enclosure to get it imaged. The enclosure was nice to have since there wasn’t much space left on any other machines. I wouldn’t be using the image much anyway after getting what I needed, but who knows.

Next I created an image of the drive with Acronis True Image. This step was easy and didn’t take as long as I had expected. It created the “.tib” file and that was it. There is not much to that at all.

Once I had an image I converted it to a VM using VMware VCenter Converter. This is a really simple process and took just a few clicks.

Finally I was able to open it VMware workstation. It worked perfectly and I was able to recover all of my projects. If you ever have a similar problem give this a shot.

Filed Under: Stuff

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

March 2012
M T W T F S S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031  
« Jan   Jul »

Blogroll

  • Atlanta MDF
  • Atlanta Microsoft Business Intelligence Group
  • Atlanta Modern Excel User Group
  • Chris Webb's BI Blog
  • codegumbo
  • Lance England
  • PowerPivotPro
  • Prologika
  • SQLBI

Tags

#SQLSatATLBI Aereo at Atlanta Microsoft BI Azure Azure DataFest Backups Batch Certification changeset Chicago Conference CrashPlan Data Modeling Data Quality DAX Deployment DVR Entity-based staging Error Messages Excel Filter Goals Headphones Healthcare Leaf Tables MDM MDS MDS Add-in for Excel Oops! Something went wrong PASS Healthcare VC Power BI Power Pivot review Roku SQLSaturday SQL Saturday 800 SQLSaturday Atlanta BI SSIS Streaming Subscription View Time Training Validation Version Flag

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Copyright © 2025 · Minimum Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in