The most basic of questions..Where to start

[CaryW]

I have a windows server PC at home. It has national known florist software on it. the owner is no longer with this chain and just needs to access her data. I want to copy this pc and run it on her new PC instead of having 2 pc's.

I installed VB and made a blank win 7 machine which is exactly the opposite of what I want to do. I want to image the server and run it on the 7 machine when she needs it.

Io got the process backwards somehow.

Thanks

[socratis]

What you want is not "basic". It's called "Physical to Virtual", or "P2V" for short. You can try searching for it with "P2V site:virtualbox.org" to see what people have tried and the caveats.

One of the methods is using Microsoft's "Disk2VHD". This creates the virtual HD of your "copied" system. Now, you create a VM in VirtualBox, as close as possible to the original one. When asked if you want to create a new HD or use an existing one, point it to the one that you created with the Disk2VHD. Expect discrepancies with things like graphics, network, USB, sound card drivers and pretty much anything that does not exist in the virtual machine. Usually Windows "fixes" those, except in extreme cases.