Instead of using the migration assistant over the wire to migrate your pc (which requires too much space and is limited by speed) you can use vmware fusion to migrate your existing windows installation.
Convert physical machine to virtual machine. This is also an excellent tool because it allows you to migrate over the wire as well. Please see the link to the download and the manual below:
Download:
http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/
Manual:
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/VMware_Converter_manual.pdf
Why not to manually attempt to migrate existing windows machine to vmware image.
This is a bad idea to start with. I have several good reasons enumerated and expounded upon below
- The problem has already been solved for you by vmware. Why do it twice? The exising solution is expedient in relation to doing it manually. Repeatedly having to boot the windows machine into different ISO startup disks.
- Manually doing the backup may cause a lot of unnecessary pain.
- Manually sizing up the partitions in the virtual disk to reflect the windows machine is very likely to cause MBR problems when you copy the image(s) over.
- Continually doing work when the option to be lazy and accomplish the same thing is available is frowned upon by most computer scientists and software engineers I know.
- The vmware utility works for certain. It has capacities that are easy to use in comparison to the knowledge required to set clonezilla to work through a samba server over a command line.
