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.
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