Similar to using a disk image copied from a real disk as in section 7.8, images from other simulators or virtual machines can also be imported into Simics.
As when importing real disks, care has to be taken to map parameters outside of the disk itself to suitable parameters in the Simics virtual machine. Such parameters include disk geometry, type of disk, and simulated hardware. For example, importing a SCSI disk image to an IDE disk image in Simics may cause issues as the disk may lack drivers for IDE, or the software configuration may simply expect the disk to show up with a name that corresponds to the type of disk, leading to failure in locating critical data.
Many simulator and virtual machine file formats can be converted for
Simics use through the qemu-img tool included
with QEMU. Notably, any QEMU format and
several VMware formats can be converted to the raw image
format with qemu-img. The qemu-img tool is
not included with Simics, but can be downloaded
from http://www.qemu.org. See the QEMU
documentation for more information about qemu-img.
The resulting raw image file can be used directly in Simics, or
converted to craff. See 7.2.1 for
a description of Simics image file formats.