virtualbox.org

Question?
Is there a way to take a system image (or) recovery drive (or) partition.iso of my windows 10, and duplicate it in a virtual drive (or) machine on my linux mint 18 host?
Just wondering because I want to be booted to linux not windows, for a more stable operational OS environment.
Does anyone know if this is even possible?
I have tried
1) Windows Recovery drive
2) Windows System image
3) Aomei System image
All of which to NO avail.

Any ideas??
Thanks in adanced.

An ISO is an image of a CD/DVD, which isn't relevant to this discussion so lets set that aside.

Technically yes, it is easy to use a tool such as Disk2VHD to image your host drive to a VHD then mount that VHD in a VM. There may be practical problems getting the image to adapt to totally different hardware, and Win10 activation problems as well - I assume you intend to stop using the Win10 license outside of the VM.

Yes ISO I was referring to was an image created from the drive. so what I'd like to do is take the current install of Windows on my hard drive make it in image and then use it in the virtualbox as a host.
Basically, I have legit install of win10 for a year now and want to take it just like it is and use it the vhd instead.

Hope I'm being clear on this. I didn't know about disk2vhd, that sounds like that may work for me.
Thanks for the info.

scotty_scott wrote:Yes ISO I was referring to was an image created from the drive.

If it's an image of a hard drive then it can't be an ISO. The name "ISO" refers to the ISO-9660 filesystem (and successors) used on CDs. That filesystem is never used on hard disks. E.g. the filesystem on a Windows 10 hard disk is NTFS.

ISO is not a synonym for "raw disk image", unless the disk happens to be a data CD/DVD.

I'm sorry to seem pedantic, but we've had many a time wasting and confusing discussion on this site which started with "I'm trying to mount an ISO in my VM...".

Pardon me for my terminology. New question then:

Will [Disk2Vhd] capture an upto date workable VHD of my current windows 10 the way it is right now and use it in virtual box just like it is booting to C: Windows in a box?

I want to boot in linux mint 18 then virtualbox, run windows as a host from that point on just as it was booting exactly as if I was on if I was on windows?

Sorry for the confusion!!

scotty_scott wrote: Will [Disk2Vhd] capture an upto date workable VHD of my current windows 10 the way it is right now and use it in virtual box just like it is booting to C: Windows in a box?

Yes, Disk2VHD can create a .VHD image of your disk. Unfortunately VHD is a pretty poor format, so personally I'd convert to VDI next using "VBoxManage clonehd ..." (VDI being VirtualBox's native format). Then to use it you create a VM and select the existing VDI when you get to the hard disk creation step.

The process is called P2V (Physical to Virtual) and it's a relatively advanced task. The main difficulty comes in getting the image to boot in radically different hardware. But we can jump that bridge when we come to it.

If you get it to boot then Windows 10 will want to be reactivated because of all the hardware changes it sees. Not a problem, provided the original image is never used again.

scotty_scott wrote:Pardon me for my terminology.

scotty_scott wrote:I want to boot in linux mint 18 then virtualbox, run windows as a host from that point on

Since we were on the terminology front, and to avoid future confusion:

• Host is your physical computer, whatever OS it is running.
• Guest is the virtual computer that runs on top of the host.

In your case, your host will be running Linux Mint 18 and your guest will be your previous Windows installation.

mpack wrote: Yes, Disk2VHD can create a .VHD image of your disk. Unfortunately VHD is a pretty poor format, so personally I'd convert to VDI next using "VBoxManage clonehd ..." (VDI being VirtualBox's native format). Then to use it you create a VM and select the existing VDI when you get to the hard disk creation step.

The process is called P2V (Physical to Virtual) and it's a relatively advanced task. The main difficulty comes in getting the image to boot in radically different hardware. But we can jump that bridge when we come to it.

If you get it to boot then Windows 10 will want to be reactivated because of all the hardware changes it sees. Not a problem, provided the original image is never used again.

Thank you for the info "mpack".
Now I have Win10 to vhd and need to play around with trying the convert to vdi.
Thanks for the help.

p.s. Would I need to perform convertfromraw command in VBoxManage??

scotty_scott wrote:Now I have Win10 to vhd and need to play around with trying the convert to vdi.

Make a backup first, you never know...

scotty_scott wrote:p.s. Would I need to perform convertfromraw command in VBoxManage??

Actually, no. What you need to do is to convert it from one format to another. Issue the command:

• VBoxManage clonemedium inputfile.vhd outputfile.vdi --format VDI

Check ch. "8.24 VBoxManage clonemedium" in the user manual for full details and more options.

Got it..
Thanks again. Very helpful.