Windows XP Physical to Virtual the easy way
Posted: 2. Jun 2009, 16:25
I have a 100+ post thread on this topic. It boils down to something very simple. There's a lot of guidance on this, but most of it turned out to be unnecessary (for me, and for at least one other person).
1. Make a copy of hal.dll in windows\system32 (so you can copy it back if you want to boot the machine again--see step 7--no spaces in the new filename)
2. Find a hal.dll in an install directory (mine was in windows\ServicePackFiles\i386\sp3.cab) and copy it to windows\system32.
3. Shutdown---immediately--do nothing else first
4. Clone the system (I used Acronis True Image)
5. Restore the clone to a vm in virtualbox
6. Boot the vm. It will recognize that it's on different hardware, and ask you to activate windows--do that, and it it will come up fine.
7. To get your physical machine back, boot it from an install cd or other live cd that will give you access to the hard drive, then restore hal.dll from the copy you made in step 1, then boot windows again.
8. You're done
1. Make a copy of hal.dll in windows\system32 (so you can copy it back if you want to boot the machine again--see step 7--no spaces in the new filename)
2. Find a hal.dll in an install directory (mine was in windows\ServicePackFiles\i386\sp3.cab) and copy it to windows\system32.
3. Shutdown---immediately--do nothing else first
4. Clone the system (I used Acronis True Image)
5. Restore the clone to a vm in virtualbox
6. Boot the vm. It will recognize that it's on different hardware, and ask you to activate windows--do that, and it it will come up fine.
7. To get your physical machine back, boot it from an install cd or other live cd that will give you access to the hard drive, then restore hal.dll from the copy you made in step 1, then boot windows again.
8. You're done