My plan to swap my old Red Hat 7 box from the physical server to the VMware system was accelerated today when the box lost a disk. I was able to swap the virtual system in to live by a quick IP address change and then starting the last few services on it. The business was happy with that.

The only problem was that I had some data on the old box that I wanted back that wasn't on the VM system. The /var partition was dead so I booted the box with a Debian Live disk and ran fsck a few times to fix the partition up. I then copied the data off that I wanted (wiki data) and shut the box down.

We'll keep the box around for spare parts until the rest of the Compaq boxes can be migrated off physical systems on the VMware farm.