ISO of HDD, ISO to then run as VM

Lisapete

Lisapete

Lisapete

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I'm so confused here. My dad has a really old machine but somehow has got W10 on it. Machine is going to fail any moment. The software run some old machine in his workshop and there is no way of getting the software.

He's new laptop is running Linux and he can then use boxes for the VM side of things.

What software can we use to make an ISO of his HDD exactly as it is so he can the run that ISO in the VM on Boxes/Linux?

Thanks
 
You want to convert the physical disc to a virtual drive then use a VM with that virtual drive. There are various ways to do it, depending on what VM host you're going to use.
 
Search for P2V (physical 2 virtual), as above there are a number of ways to do it, one being VMWare convertor, have a search about and see which method suits you best, it would also likely depend on what virtualisation platform you intend to run the VM on.
 
When I've done it in the past I've mounted the HDD in another machine (in my case using an external USB->SATA interface) and used disk2vhd to make an image to mount in VirtualBox.

I've heard Windows 10 doesn't always like this method (RE activation) however - especially if the original license is OEM - there are ways around that for VMs however.

Windows 10 probably installed itself if he had Windows 7 or newer on there before with automatic updates enabled.
 
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