newbie - import windows install from broken pc

[Danno64]

I'm very new to this so I'd appreciate any help. I am planning to try and restore a windows installation into a virtual machine using VirtualBox. The PC where the install exists is broken so I just have the hard disk. My approach will be to try to access this via a USB to SATA cable (ordered on eBay). I've seen the odd post that talks about VHD or VDI which is required to import/transfer an existing installation but I don't think I'll be able to do this as I don't think I can run any commands against the disk - I expect the machine that is the host will see it has a disk that it can mount, but nothing else.

If anyone has done anything similar to this I'd much appreciate any guidance or pointers.

Thanks in advance.

Danny

[scottgus1]

If you attach the disk as a USB drive than you might use Mpack's CloneVDI to make a .vdi virtual disk copy of the drive's whole contents.

Note this from CloneVDI's instructions:

Using CloneVDI to do a P2V ("Physical To Virtual" Disk Conversion)
------------------------------------------------------------------
CloneVDI now recognizes when you have used a Windows disk device name as the source filename
(for example, "\\.\PhysicalDrive0" identifies the boot drive on most Windows hosts), and
slightly modifies its behaviour in that case to make it possible to clone the physical host
hard disk to a VDI file. Basically, all it does is use a different method to get the "source
file size", otherwise everything works as before. Be warned that this feature is extremely
rudimentary, so it is up to you to use it sensibly. In particular you should have no other
applications running (certainly nothing that creates and/or writes to files), and the clone
should be written to a different drive. On some Windows hosts you may also need to run
CloneVDI with elevated privileges ("Run as administrator") since this feature requires
CloneVDI to have sector level (read only) access to the source drive.

Use the host PC's Disk Management tool to find out what "Disk #" the USB-attached drive is, then in CloneVDI, as the sourde drive, type "\\.\PhysicalDrive#" Don't put the double-quotes, do substitute the # for the disk number of the drive in Disk Management.

Make a guest using the same OS and bittedness as the OS on the drive. When you get to the "Hard Disk" part, choose to add an existing disk, then find the file made by CloneVDI.

[socratis]

I would skip the USB-to-SATA part, and attach the old HD as a secondary SATA drive. Much faster...