physical migration of older machines

[Jerry Geis <geisj-HlEKYY4NwfurDvn5mFPilA@public.gmane.org>]

I have an AMD 4800+ machine with 2 GIG RAM.

I have OLD machines that I want to virtualize and then TURN OFF.
The old machines are redhat 7.3, redhat 9, centos 4 i386.  I am using 
centos 5 x86_64.

I need to have the OLD machines migrated to the virtual image.
What is the BEST way to do that??? Thats my big question.

Below is what I have tried and not been successful. I did not find a FAQ 
on this...

Thanks,

Jerry

----------------------------
I have the old disk and I created a 10GIG image and installed the 7.3, 9 
and centos 4.
Now I want to make sure the new image matches the physical image.
I mounted the image as:

mount -t ext3 -o loop,offset=32256 Image.redhat7.3.img /mnt/image

then I executed

tar --exclude ./boot --exclude --exclude ./proc --exclude ./dev -cvf - . | ssh root-Q0ErXNX1RuZ17XPQcNv0jw@public.gmane.org "( cd /mnt/image ; tar xvpf -)"

on the physical machine to copy to my host.

This seemed to work but on booting the file system is corrupt. I did umount /mnt/image before booting the VM.



I have not tried Ghost as the physical disk on these machines is minimum of 100GIG and I dont want VM images 
of this size. 10GIG is all I really need.





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