Hi, I have a virtual machine with OSX installed.  Is there a way to move it to a physical disk? I already know how to make the NVME disk visible to the VM, what I do not know is how to clone the disk.

 

anybody has done this?

 

Thank you in advance for your help.

5 hours ago, RenatoEurope said:

anybody has done this?

Yes, recently moved from a mac os big sur vdisk to physical hard drive.

First delete all the partitions in the target disk

Then use dd command in terminal:

dd if='/path/to/vdisk.img' of=/dev/sdX

sdX is your target disk (maybe it's not sdX but nvmeXnY (?) --> look at it with ls /dev/).

Note that for nvme drives nvmeX represents the controller, nvmeXnY represents the storage namespace and nvmeXnYpZ represents a partition.

You want the storage namespace nvmeXnY in the command.

 

This will clone 1:1 the vdisk to the target disk: note that the target disk must be equal or bigger in size; if it's bigger you can expand the size once you boot mac os.

If you already have a bootloader in the vdisk you are cloning it's ok, that efi partition will be cloned into the target disk; if you have a separate vdisk for the bootloader you need to make sure you boot first that bootloader vdisk.

Edited July 1, 20215 yr by ghost82

Hi thank you for your reply, I thought of using dd but I never used it before (but for preparing a bootable USB for OSX. Does the target disk need to be formatted or it does not matter? 

 

Moreover, can I speculate when you say the target disk has to be bigger, do you mean the used part? I mean, The original disk is 2TB, the target disk is 1TB, but I have used just 100GB of the first disk, I would speculate this still works, is that correct?

3 hours ago, RenatoEurope said:

Does the target disk need to be formatted or it does not matter? 

I prefer to delete all the partitions on the target drive.

 

3 hours ago, RenatoEurope said:

The original disk is 2TB, the target disk is 1TB

I think it will not fit; I had a raw img file of less than 500 gb (470 if I remember well), with 80/90 Gb used, I cloned it on a 500Gb drive and ended up in having 470Gb written on the target.

Then I expanded the allocated space with the 5-10 Gb of unallocated space.

Edited July 4, 20215 yr by ghost82