If you just have the physical hard drive, not the running OS per se, in a USB enclosure or added to another system then an alternative to using dd is to create a temporary VM in order to add the physical hard disk as a Raw Disk and then without attempting to boot the VM then use vmware-vdiskmanager to create a normal file based virtual hard disk while pointing to the Raw Disk meta-data .vmdk file. This newly created normal file based virtual hard disk can then be used in a VM. This may be much easier for you then using dd in Linux and manually creating the Disk DescriptorFile for it. However depending on the installed OS on that drive then using either scenario you might have to deal with a BSOD when booting as drivers and Windows Registry entries will need to be rectified. This really has been covered ad nauseum so a search of the forums and or Google should yield you directions on either scenario.
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