1. A method for converting a disk of a physical computer into a virtual disk for use by a virtual machine comprising: copying contents of the disk of the physical computer into an image file, wherein the image file has a different sector-by-sector organization of the contents than the disk but a logically equivalent file system organization; extracting hardware configuration information from the image file, wherein the hardware configuration information relates to hardware of the physical computer; and replacing, based on a comparison of the extracted hardware configuration information and a virtual hardware configuration of the virtual machine, hardware-dependent files in the image file with substitute files that are compatible with the virtual hardware configuration of the virtual machine.