General

Clone a physical machine to a VM (http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/itdojo/virtualizing-a-physical-linux-machine/3197?tag=nl.e101)

dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/EXTERNAL_DRIVE/sda.img bs=1024

After you fire up this command, you need to walk away from the computer for two reasons: (1) The command will take quite a while to complete, and (2) You do not want to interact with that computer while dd runs, because you could wind up with an I/O Error. When that command finishes, take a look at the file on your external drive — it should be a rather sizable file named sda.img.

Converting to a virtual machine image

Before you start this process, you must make sure qemu is installed. Open your Add/Remove Software tool, do a search for “qemu” (no quotes), and install the package from there. When that installs, it will also install the necessary command to be used in this process.

You can run this command that will convert the img file to a Qemu-ready image:

qemu-img convert -f raw sda.img -O qcow sda-qcow.img

You can also run this command that will convert the img file to a VWware vmdk file:

qemu-img convert -f raw sda.img -O vmdk sda.vmdk