Virtualise old laptop

[Danthus]

I have a laptop and the motherboard has failed. Can I take out the hard rive, virtualise ind and run it from another machine?

The laptop will not boot so I can not install anything on it to convert it.

 

[linktoinsanity]

Yeah it should be possible to do this, probably with Oracle Virtualbox or VMware.

I'm sure I've done it before, can't remember what software I used, but you shouldn't need to install anything on it to start with. Windows will probably need reactivating though...

 

[Saundie]

If you connect the hard drive to another system, you can then use something like Disk2VHD to image the drive to a VHD file. I have done this once in the past and had an utter nightmare in getting the VHD to boot, as I had neglected to include the boot partition in the VHD - just make sure you include the boot partition in the VHD and it should be fine.

 

[Danthus]

Cool, I will give it a bash.

 

[this_is_gav]

I've had luck previously backing up a hard drive using Disk2VHD to capture a hard drive image, then using WinImage (evaluation for 30 days) to convert the image file to a VMware image, then using VMware Converter (should still be free) to create the virtual machine.

Not a short process, and chances are if it does boot (it's a hugely complex task you're asking the software to perform) you'll need to reactivate Windows and it will be slow.

With the working PC you could have just used VMware Converter to do it all, but without it being able to boot, I don't think you can do it all in VMWare Converter.

I used the Disk2VHD method previously to create virtual copies of a server to test things before deploying (I guess our server RAID setup was enough to confused VMware Converter). I always managed to get a working image in the end.

 

[Raumarik]

If you can remove any garbage before virtualising it, will save time.

 

[Danthus]

If you can remove any garbage before virtualising it, will save time.

I can't power the laptop on, time isn't really an issue, just being able to boot it is.

I got an error just as the process completed. Error during copy: incorrect function.

Grrrrr

 

[Danthus]

I can't get this to work, it gets right to the end but I always get the "Error during copy: incorrect function" error.

 

[Craig321]

Try VMWare Converter

 

[this_is_gav]

Try VMWare Converter

Doesn't work if the machine itself isn't, or you have an image to convert from (Acronis True Image backups are supported, so that's potentially an option, but I don't know which versions are supported), or the method I posted above, converting from a Disk2VHD image via WinImage.