Non-System Disk or Disk Error - restoring a System Image to a VM

[Trombone-Fiddler]

I'm getting a "Non-system disk or disk error" when I try to boot a VM from an ISO file containing the Windows 10 Repair Disk image.

I'm working to migrate my Windows 10 Pro from my PC to a VM. The image of Windows 10 Pro is a Full Version that I have installed on a Surface Pro 4. The way I am going to do this is via making a system image, then restoring the system image to the guest. The host is running on a Mac.

Going the route of migrating as a system image lets me do the migration without trying to pull the drive out of the Surface Pro 4, gets around BitLocker, let's me restore to a VDI guest drive that's a lot bigger than what I have now.

The place I am stuck is that when I try to boot from DVD containing the Windows 10 64-bit system repair disk, I get the error "Non-system disk or disk error."

For convenience I dismounted the DVD and did a

dd if=/dev/disk2 of=Win10Repair.iso

If I substitute an ISO that contains a Linux installation, that boots fine.

The "file" command reports that the ISO is bootable:

Win10Repair.iso: ISO 9660 CD-ROM filesystem data 'REPAIR_DISC_WINDOWS_10_64_BIT' (bootable)

I tried doing this from the hardware USB DVD player and also via the the ISO, and get the "Non-system disk..." error both cases.

If I make that VM point to a Linux distribution ISO as an Optical drive, to boot from, it comes right up.

I tried fiddling with various settings but it does not help.

It seems to be some sort of VirtualBox thing. I'm going to see if I can get Qemu to boot the ISO.

[mpack]

If VirtualBox tells you that a CD is not bootable, then it isn't bootable. Likewise if the guest BIOS tells you the same thing.

Are you sure that the ISO contains an image of a repair CD? Because copying a bunch of files to a CD does not make it bootable, and making a CD bootable doesn't turn it into an installer. Only the presence of an install program does that.

Of course you can image the source PC with Disk2VHD, but that would leave you with BitLocker etc problems to deal with.

Finally: be warned that if you didn't install Windows from a generic installer then there's no guarantee that it's compatible with a generic PC. Even if you get it to boot, Windows will definitely want to be reactivated (disabling the Surface Pro), and anyway the activation function may not like the fact that the hardware is not a Surface Pro 4.

I don't hold out much hope for this project. IMHO it would be easier to buy a new Win10 license for VMing.