Help with turning a physical windows 10 installation into a vm.

Discussions related to using VirtualBox on Linux hosts.
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gcars06
Posts: 2
Joined: 7. May 2021, 18:56

Help with turning a physical windows 10 installation into a vm.

Post by gcars06 »

I have decided to switch to Linux (Zorin OS) but I have some programs that won't run on Linux even with wine or proton so I want to be able to turn my previous windows 10 installation into a VM. I tried using disk2vhd and some other programs and still no luck. They all resulted in the error of "Fatal; No bootable medium found, System Halted". I then decided to image my SSD and turn that into a .vdi using VirtualBox. This also resulted in the same error. I have no idea what to do next. Any Ideas?
scottgus1
Site Moderator
Posts: 20965
Joined: 30. Dec 2009, 20:14
Primary OS: MS Windows 10
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Windows, Linux

Re: Help with turning a physical windows 10 installation into a vm.

Post by scottgus1 »

You're trying a "Physical to Virtual", or P2V. Web-search "P2V Windows 10" to get general concepts, and "P2V Windows 10 site:forums.virtualbox.org" to see what forum posters have done.

If you are moving the Windows 10 that was on your PC to the VM, then you should be able to do so if you had a retail license for 10. If it was OEM, as in it was previously installed by the PC manufacturer, it may not boot successfully, or it may not activate even if you do get it to boot.

If you have a retail license, you might do better to just fresh-install 10 and the programs in the VM, then transfer data from the old install.
gcars06
Posts: 2
Joined: 7. May 2021, 18:56

Re: Help with turning a physical windows 10 installation into a vm.

Post by gcars06 »

Thanks for your help, I looked around and found out that I needed to enable EFI boot. Now it works
scottgus1
Site Moderator
Posts: 20965
Joined: 30. Dec 2009, 20:14
Primary OS: MS Windows 10
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Windows, Linux

Re: Help with turning a physical windows 10 installation into a vm.

Post by scottgus1 »

Great! Glad you're up and running!
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