Years ago, when I decommissioned my last Windows machine, I was able to create a VM that was an image of its drive just before I powered it down for the last time.
Now, the time has come to try to do something similar with my 6 year old MacBook Pro. As I type this, it is sitting in FireWire Target Disk mode, and I am copying my important data off of it and onto my new iMac.
The thing is, I would be a whole lot more comfortable if I could create a VMware VM of its current boot drive state, just in case I want to look up some settings or have lost a license key and need to recover the information or license file from the old installation, or whatever.
I don't see a way to do this. I not only have the actual drive accessible via FireWire, but also have a reasonably current Time Machine backup on an external drive. I could also do various things like copy the disk to a disk image file, if I could go from there to a VM image.
The MacBook Pro is not completely dead, so I could conceivably fire it up and talk to it on the network, but that seems silly.
Is there a procedure for accomplishing this? If not, I suppose just taking the image copy would be OK for most of the things I can think of maybe needing it for, but being able to actually boot it up in a VM seems much more desirable.
(One of the things I'd like to do is start uninstalling software until I find the thing that's been sucking down 95+% of the cpu cycles, so I know what *not* to install on the new Mac. I'd do it on the actual MacBook Pro, but it had a run-in with some diet soda and there's not a lot of excess room on my desk for it.)