Importing / using a physical hard drive to a virtual machine

[Jedmar]

Hi,

I have a hard drive which has windows installed on it. I would like to be able to use this install with Virtual box either by importing it to a virtual machine or by pointing to it directly. Is this possible?

[socratis]

Both of them are doable. The "pointing to it directly" is called raw disk access, it's for advanced VirtualBox users, so if you have to ask for it, I'd leave it for now.

The second, safest choice, is what's called Physical to Virtual, or P2V for short. You can Google for it. One of the tools often used is called Disk2VHD, from Microsoft. This will create a virtual disk ^[1] that you can use to build a virtual machine around it. The VM should closely resemble your physical setup, except the RAM if you can't afford it. The most important part is the disk controller, the rest of the hardware Windows can pretty much recover from. You might have activation issues with Windows.

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^[1] : The VHD disk that this process creates is native to Microsoft, not to VirtualBox. You could use it, but it is suggested that you "clone" it to a VDI, the native format supported by VirtualBox.

[Jedmar]

Thanks. I'll give Disk2VHD a go. I just want to unregister some Adobe apps, so activation shouldn't be an issue.

[socratis]

Just to make it clear; I was talking about Windows activation, not activation of application running on your Windows. Not that they're going to be super happy if they're tied to your hardware, but since I don't know what you might or you might not have installed, 1) I don't want to speculate and 2) to be completely honest with you, I don't really want to know