Create VM from physical machine

My machine has a non-clean install of win 10, which I have been using for months. I would like to do a clean install of windows 10, but I don't want to be down for days getting everything setup. So I figured I would run it in a VM on the newly installed OS while I set things up on new machine.

I used disk2vhd to create VHDX files from my c and d drive (users folder on d). I created a VM and added the disks. But hypervisor won't recogize the disk as bootable.

I am thinking this is because my host uses UEFI, so the VHDX's were created with a VHDX instead of mbr? I have tried booting the VM using the window install disk to do bootred /rebuildbcd, but the command fails, I am guessing because it doesn't work on UEFI disks?

Any suggestsions?

I thought I had created a Gen 2 VM (coincidence, didn't know at the time), and that is what I was having trouble with on with the VHDX disks.

But I just redid the images and made .VHD files, then specifcally made a gen 1 VM. That worked, but man is it slowed compared to Gen2 VM's I have made. But could be because the vhd files on an IDE, and there some services running that I don't normally run on a VM.

Would you expect a gen 2 setup to be faster than a gen1? Or is it mainly just a feature set change?

If you plan ahead, meaning have your drivers downloaded and ready on a flash drive, it doesn't take days to do a clean install plus configuration. You can do it all in as little as 2 hours.

Hi there
If you don't mind using vmware (Player is free) -- you'll have to disable HYPER-V -note you don't have to uninstall it - and then simply run the Vmware free converter tool from within your current Windows physical OS.

I think this can also create HYPER-V type files too (never tried that though) so if you want to go down that route try that method.
Note though edit your target vm settings -- you might want just the OS and applications - not all the data disks and I'd set the processor to a single processor.

It's all in an easy GUI. You need to create an account (free) - but at least vmware doesn't nag you with loads of ads etc.

Download VMware vCenter Converter Standalone for P2V Conversion

If you want to reduce the size of the OS Disk in the VM - what I'd do is to create the vm first with the converter tool, then download an ISO image of GPARTED or other partitioning software, boot the VM with the ISO image as first boot device, reduce the partition size, then backup the OS with Macrium, create a new VM with the new HDD size and then restore your backed up VM image.

Sounds complicated but actually very simple - especially if you have your VM on an SSD - won't take more than a few minutes for the backup / restore.

Cheers
jimbo

Hi there
It worked fine for me -- choose the Stand alone converter - you don't need all the server stuff - and ensure you run it from within your actual physical running Windows system.

I'm currently re-building my NAS box (Linux Centos 7 server) otherwise I'd post a screen shot or two.

It's very simple and works.

Cheers
jimbo

Night Hawk said:

I ran into a bunch of account log in requirements and other things I normally would never see simply going for the latest WS 12 Player. But the real concern was the size here even if compressed down from the whopping 703gb to 500gb would still be simply too large since I run VMs about 60-80gb in size at the max except for some Linux distro down about 15gb tops for LMDE not ubuntu which will be about 8gb tops. A good number of the programs here wouldn't even run anyways being hardware dependent.

Hi there.

I think if stuff is highly hardware dependant then using a VM probably isn't the right way to go unless you can get specialized VM's that have access to the physical hardware (Pass thru) to your actual hardware. In this case you will really need to use something like Esxi or equivalent. HYPER-V is probable even harder to use your own hardware - especially for USB and Multi-media support.

Vmware and Vbox use "para virtualisation" so you can get limited hardware support such as installing hardware drivers on the VM for some USB devices.

For extreme gaming / specialized graphics for instance you can only really test these properly in a VM environment if you use something like Esxi - which (Free BTW) is quite fussy over the base hardware it runs on. You will need to set up essentially a "White Box" to get it to work and you'll have to access the VM's remotely via RDP from a laptop or another computer.

The Esxi OS is actually quite interesting -it's tiny so takes effectively ZERO Host resources which can all be given to the VM's and can easily be booted in a few seconds from a USB stik or even an SD card. Once the OS has booted you can remove the media as it's not needed again - the OS is memory resident (and tiny).

Great fun if you've got the time and equipmenet to play with this. Note - one thing it's incredibly fussy on is for a supported LAN or Wifi NIC. If it doesn't like the Nic it won't boot. INTEL NIC's always work though.

Cheers
jimbo