Virtualising Windows 7 for operation in Windows 10?

[david25]

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)

 

[david25]

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?

 

[david25]

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