V2P Tutorial needed!!

nkaufman said:

Thank you for your continued assistance. I guess I now have more questions than before





Ok, will do that. Install Win-10 on a VM and use Win-7 Key to activate. Will select 'Do not have key' initially while installing.





So, after running command, VM shuts down and I use macrium boot usb/iso to boot from OR will system re-start and I need to take some steps to use macrium boot/iso?









I have free Macrium Reflect but never used to create boot iso/usb/dvd. Will search on this forum to do that.


Can I create a macrium boot iso/usb from macrium reflect running on a Win-7 PC or do I need to create this boot dvd/iso from a Win-10 PC?





Exellent points. Since these VMs will be transferred to newer models of physical machines, I'd assume that I need to create VMs with UEFI/GPT.


In VMWare Workstation, do I get to choose what type of VM I'm creating? Or do I need to create these VMs on a Win-10 host with UEFI/GPT?


I'll keep the size to a minimum since these VMs would only have windows installed, nothing else.

Hi there

your reply is a bit confusing

I assume if you want a V2P you already have a VIRTUAL MACHINE image in some working format.

In this case if you don't have the vmware format simply download the vmware converter tools and convert to vmware format -- vmware player is FREE.

(The converter is also Free).

Download VMware vCenter Converter Standalone for P2V Conversion

Don't be put off by the fact it says P2V --it also works for V2V (Virtual to Virtual) -- after all there's nothing to stop you saying your "Physical machine" is actually a VM in a different format such as VBOX !!.

Then boot the VM, run macrium to image the VM FROM WITHIN THE VM and then restore FROM A STAND ALONE bootable system to your target HDD -- and re-boot the physical machine.

Not sure what the problem is --method works 100% on any Virtual machine I've tried to convert and run on a physical machine. Activation is another issue --you will need licence keys or W7/W8/W8.1 keys to activate the W10 system.

If boot fails ist time round simply run the windows installer (created from Windows media creator) and run repair system --normally not needed.

Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

Hi there

your reply is a bit confusing...

Funny I was about to state that for your first response.

I'm not sure if you looked at the original post. Could you please look at that and let me know what steps would I need to take. I do not have a VM already.

Thanks for your assistance.

Thank you Kari for your assistance. I think I now have all information to begin the process.

Have not tried it on a Win-7 machine but on a Win-10 with VMWare Workstation, I see that I do get the option of creating VM either with legacy BIOS or EFI.

From VMware manual:
"Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is replacing BIOS as a technology that newer computers and operatingsystems use to boot computers. EFI is sometimes referred to as Unified Extensible Firmware Interface
(UEFI)."






Thanks again for your assistance.

Hello Kari,

While creating rescue media in Macrium Reflect on a Win-7 Host, after selecting Win-10 as PE, I get the following dialog box that indicates that rescue media has the drivers associated with host machine. Is that going to be a problem later on?

Thanks,

Hi there
Just one final point here

A VMWARE VM can have a UEFI or MBR (standard) boot whether or not the physical machine has UEFI capability.
If you create a VMware image with a UEFI boot you won't be able to create a physical machine (V2P) from the virtual machine if the physical machine isn't UEFI enabled.

Creating a VM from the physical machine (P2V) doesn't matter --just change the options in the VM's config settings.

Note Macrium is excellent at cloning / restoring images - even to machines with different hardware. The resulting Windows (physical) is usually bootable and on the rare cases where it doesn't a repair system from the windows ISO works fine.

Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

A VMWARE VM can have a UEFI or MBR (standard) boot whether or not the physical machine has UEFI capability.
If you create a VMware image with a UEFI boot you won't be able to create a physical machine (V2P) from the virtual machine if the physical machine isn't UEFI enabled.

Interesting. So one can create a EFI VM with legacy host and there'd be no issues while creating a physical machine (w/UEFI enabled)?

nkaufman said:

Interesting. So one can create a EFI VM with legacy host and there'd be no issues while creating a physical machine (w/UEFI enabled)?

Hi there
That's the point of VM's - you can do things like that

On an old PC with virtualisation in the CPU enabled (all new cpu's are by default) I ran W7 X64 and even W10 X-64 on XP !!!! (32 bit).

Of course the XP system could only access 4GB memory so Host + VM together could only have a max combined RAM of 4GB but it was an interesting exercise running a 64 bit guest OS on XP. !!!

Cheers
jimbo

Kari - Thanks for your assistance in this. I was able to create Win-10 images for my set of retail Win-7 licenses. Hopefully I'll be able to restore images to physical machines in the next couple of months when I'll be getting some new machines.