Anthony Hogan writes:
[dying linux raid1 server, p2v]
Since this is a short-term goal (because you ARE gonna go back and make the "clean" VM afterwards, right?), I would keep it as dumb as possible: - boot a live medium - cat /dev/sda | ssh vm-server cat \> sda.img - cat /dev/sdb | ssh vm-server cat \> sdb.img - ssh vm-server -t kvm -curses -hda sda.img -hdb sdb.img I *think* you can skip dd'ing the second drive and just cp sda.img sdb.img. Your most likely problem will be that you don't have space for a complete copy of both disks on the VM server, even temporarily. In that case you can remove the md layer -- running the VM as a degraded array would half the space, and is perfectly reasonable (assuming the VM server's storage has redundancy, of course). Further than that, you will need to start ripping open the md and copying the filesystems or files to a fresh disk layout and ensuring the system can boot in the new configuration (by wibbling grub.cfg, fstab, etc). That isn't particularly hard if you've done it before, but can be tedious, which is why for a temporary VM I suggest not bothering. As another poster mentioned, you can use netcat instead of ssh for transferring over the network, but this assumes an ultimately trusted LAN. You could also do it by eSATA or similar.