Running previous OS installation on external HDD using Virtualbox

icysniper · 27 Nov 2019 at 15:15

Hi guys,

I have taken my old hard drive out of my previous laptop and I was wondering if I could use virtualbox or similar to boot/run the original OS off the old hard drive through my current OS on new laptop. Both OSs are windows 10 64-bit. After a quick search online I couldn't find a definitive answer - so it may just be easier to back everything up and do a fresh install if I needed to use a virtual machine, just curious

Cheers!

Deleted member 77746 · 27 Nov 2019 at 16:17

Yeh you can but I am not sure why you would want too.

Rroff · 27 Nov 2019 at 16:21

Yes you can use something like Disk2VHD or a similar tool.

icysniper · 27 Nov 2019 at 16:37

mrbell1984 said:
Yeh you can but I am not sure why you would want too.

It's mainly due to software/data conflicts when opening the same type of raw data file from two analysis machines I use for research. It gets quite frustrating sometimes

I could also potentially use the hard drive if I were to make a home server or something in the future.

Rroff said:
Yes you can use something like Disk2VHD or a similar tool.

Cool nice! Will have a look into it!

However, it may be easier just to copy the data and create a new virtual machine installation.

Cheers guys!

Deleted member 77746 · 27 Nov 2019 at 16:39

icysniper said:
when opening the same type of raw data file from two analysis machines I use for research.

Got ya. As already mentioned Disk2VHD should work.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd

icysniper · 27 Nov 2019 at 16:49

mrbell1984 said:
Got ya. As already mentioned Disk2VHD should work.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd

Nice one guys will have a look into it

Cromulent · 4 Dec 2019 at 18:46

If you have Windows 10 Pro, you can use Hyper-V which I find much better than Virtualbox or if you want you could use VMWare Workstation Player which is also free. I tend to prefer the VMWare tools as they have tons of features that I haven't played around with properly yet (like setting up virtual networks between virtual machines).