Virtualising Windows 7 for operation in Windows 10?

david25 · 23 Apr 2021 at 08:44

Hello, it is possible (easy) to virtualise a "bare metal" Windows 7 installation (split across two partitions) and then run this within Windows 10?

This reduces the pain of migrating old apps and data for me whilst 'enjoying' Windows 10 and new fast hardware.

I think the problem is the current installation is tied to very old hardware that was never a clean VM install.

(the Windows 7 installation does have a retail key)

Django x2 · 23 Apr 2021 at 09:50

Heh? Bare metal means the hyper visor (ie, the host). That's what you want to be running Windows 10. Then you just use Hyper-V on it (or any of the other bloatware versions like Virtual Box or VMware) and install Windows 7 on that.

For productivity like this, I actually use Windows Server 2019 on an old XPS laptop which has XP, 7, and 10 VMs installed on it for as and when I might need to dev/test something.

Sp00n · 23 Apr 2021 at 13:21

You want to P2V (physical to virtual) your existing machine?

I haven't done that for a while but previously I have used vCenter Converter tool to do this in order to virtualise some legacy servers but i think this requires a vhost destination which you won't have.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd I think would be what you want, image the disk to a vhd and then you can just attach it to a new vm in virtualbox.

Django x2 · 23 Apr 2021 at 13:27

Oh, I see what we're doing now. Hah, stuff all that fancy guff. Just use Acronis to create an ISO of your physical OS Disks and mount that in a VM with hardware acceleration and passthru turned off. You'll get a few errors about drivers, etc, but boot the VM in safe mode and address those and off you go.

david25 · 23 Apr 2021 at 16:25

Sp00n said:
You want to P2V (physical to virtual) your existing machine?

I haven't done that for a while but previously I have used vCenter Converter tool to do this in order to virtualise some legacy servers but i think this requires a vhost destination which you won't have.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd I think would be what you want, image the disk to a vhd and then you can just attach it to a new vm in virtualbox.

Thank you, yes. I want to virtualise an old Windows 7 setup so I can sell the hardware and migrate the data at my leisure.

Can I mount the output of disk2vhs on Windows 10 Pro Hyper-v?

Is it that easy, do I need to convert the little 100Mb boot partition?

Sp00n · 23 Apr 2021 at 17:03

david25 said:
Thank you, yes. I want to virtualise an old Windows 7 setup so I can sell the hardware and migrate the data at my leisure.

Can I mount the output of disk2vhs on Windows 10 Pro Hyper-v?

Is it that easy, do I need to convert the little 100Mb boot partition?

I've never used Hyper-v but this guide seems relevant and suggests so: https://www.veeam.com/blog/how-to-convert-physical-machine-hyper-v-virtual-machine-disk2vhd.html

david25 · 23 Apr 2021 at 18:12

Sp00n said:
I've never used Hyper-v but this guide seems relevant and suggests so: https://www.veeam.com/blog/how-to-convert-physical-machine-hyper-v-virtual-machine-disk2vhd.html

Thank you, time for some reading

FredFlint · 29 Apr 2021 at 15:02

I have a copy of Win 7 Running on Hyper-V that I use for testing as some customer devices still use it. The hardest part for me was finding the OS ISO as it was hard to find, ended up getting one and used a checksum tester just to make sure it was not tampered with.

Rroff · 29 Apr 2021 at 15:10

Imaged my old Windows 7 laptop to a .vhd and booted it in VirtualBox - runs most stuff fine aside from some newer games and performance is OK.