Migrating to new pc and virtualize old pc

Yes, there is a way of getting Hyper-V on Home which you've no doubt found:
How To Enable Hyper-V On Windows 10 Home

Home -> Pro: which I suppose you've tried:
Upgrade Windows 10 Home to Windows 10 Pro

Well done!

einstein1969 said:

I have a question. I have heard of the macrium viboot. Does it have anything to do with this procedure that you did?

No, nothing at all to do with what I did.

Macrium's viBoot is a very useful feature in its own right, and is included in Reflect Free. What it does is let you boot directly from a Macrium image as a virtual machine, either in Hyper-V if you have Pro on your host PC, or with VirtualBox in both Home and Pro.

I frequently use it as a quick way to verify that an image is valid and complete, or to quickly run up an old machine's image without having to go to the trouble of restoring it to a PC.

Bree said:

No, nothing at all to do with what I did.

Macrium's viBoot is a very useful feature in its own right, and is included in Reflect Free. What it does is let you boot directly from a Macrium image as a virtual machine, either in Hyper-V if you have Pro on your host PC, or with VirtualBox in both Home and Pro.

I frequently use it as a quick way to verify that an image is valid and complete, or to quickly run up an old machine's image without having to go to the trouble of restoring it to a PC.

One minor weakness with Viboot is it always creates a new vm, and consequently the vm is unactivated. It would be neat if you could select an existing activated vm instead.

Bit of a faff, but you can create a (new) merged vhdx file (viboot uses differencing vhds) and open that in an activated vm.

cereberus said:

One minor weakness with Viboot is it always creates a new vm, and consequently the vm is unactivated.....

True, but I don't think I've ever run a viBoot vm for more than a few tens of minutes. It's a great way to verify an image is sound and bootable. But my most frequent use for it is to quickly run up an image of an old machine or OS to help answer version-specific questions here on TF (I have images back as far as 1507, if needs be). It's so much quicker than a restore, and when I'm done I can just delete the VM.

jimbo45 said:

Any boot problems --you don't need VIboot or Macrium's fix boot feature.

Simply decide on which HDD is your boot device and ensure it has an EFI partition of at least 100 MB

Boot any windows device that can start in the command line -- can be even old windows iso, Macrium stand alone or whatever

then get into Diskpart to assign the 100mb efi partition as letter "S" say.
your Windows install is say on disk W
your command line is on disk X

exit partition manager

now cd w:\windows\system32

w:
bcdboot w:\windows /s S: /f UEFI

do this for all windows installs you need to -- simply have ONE single bootable disk with ONE EFI file -- then you'll get the standard boot menu if you've several Windows installs -- this also will work on a VM too and also if your windows installs are via vhdx files.



All this is "Bog standard" windows these days. No need for 3rd party paid tools to accomplish this - and you can even restore a VM image to "Real" or a "Real image" to a VM via standard imaging tools (GPARTED, Macrium Free, etc).

Don't pay for stuff when you don't have to and the free methods are simple.

With VM's though remember if copying or moving to copy the GUUID or windows will probably think its a new machine and want activation.

Cheers
jimbo

Sure you can use various dism, bcd line edit tools to create boot entries but the syntax is not always easy.

You have a Linux background with command line skills

For many lesser experienced users (and even experienced users) use of established 3rd party tools just makes life easier as they are gui based.

I can assure you the Reflect "fix Windows boot problems" feature has fixed boot issues many times for me, without having to mess around with command lines.

Equally, I modify my multi boot screen a lot each time new Insider builds come out.

Easybcd just makes it so simple to add, delete, rename/reorder boot entries that use it all the time.

Sometimes I use commands, mostly from batch files.

There is no right way or wrong way.

Time and a place for either approach depending on activity and skill levels.