[Solved] Windows 8.1 Guest: Which Partitions?

[MontyMan]

I have been successful in creating VMs that run Windows 10 and XP Professional; however was never certain I got only the necessary disk partitions, because there was so much trial and error involved in getting the machines up, and each try takes hours. But it did little harm to bring over an extra recovery partition if it only took up a few GB. Of course, if I had found this article from the jump, I would have saved myself many of those hours.

With this current project, it won't be possible to try all combinations of these many partitions, as I was able to do with only 2 or 3 in a computer. I'm doing a P2V on an 8.1 computer with the bewildering set of partitions shown attached. I brought it up in Linux Live, just to see which partition(s) were marked with a boot flag, and unfortunately the one that does, is not visible within Windows. But most of them are. So when I run Disk2VHD, I certainly don't want to bring ALL these over, and I don't know how to tell which ones will be essential to my VM functioning properly. Any ideas?

Related question: Are the "MergeIDE" fixes required before doing P2V in an 8.1 system?

Thanks!
...Monty.

[mpack]

MergeIDE is only required for XP AFAIK.

One thing to beware: modern Windows machines (8.1 and 10) often use a UEFI BIOS, so you need to enable EFI in the VirtualBox VM.

p.s. Your screenshot is illegible. I suggest you use Windows snipping tool in future, as the quality is vastly superior to a photograph.

A general answer to your question: always image the entire source drive if possible. Deleting unwanted partitions is something you can always do later.

[MontyMan]

Thanks Mpack! The full size one is very legible but unfortunately the 128kB max made me scrunch and degrade too much. I've tried it again here and gotten a lot closer to the 128k limit; if you view in a separate tab and grow it, it should be visible now. The Live was on the metal so a Windows screen shot wasn't possible there. Not sure about the UEFI; in order to make the computer compatible with Linux Live sticks, I went into BIOS and changed the boot mode from UEFI to "Support Legacy" and it still boots Windows OK. So I'll enable what you said in my VM. Maybe I'll try bringing over the C drive only, and see if that works.

Best,
..Monty.

[mpack]

The C:\ filesystem is a volume, not a drive. It is not bootable by itself. You can see that all of your partitions are on "/dev/sda", i.e. all on one drive (drive a).

Typical layout of a standard modern Windows PC (GPT partitioning) is:

1. EFI System partition (FAT filesystem - contains primary boot code). 200-400 MB.
2. Microsoft reserved partition. Unknown filesystem (allegedly it's just reserved space, unused). 100-200 MB. Normally hidden by OS.
3. User data partition (NTFS). Occupies most of disk, this is your C: volume.
4. Manufacturer's data partition, contains the data needed for restoring to factory defaults (optional, can be deleted, may not be present on self installs).

If you see some other pattern, e.g. 2 of the huge data partitions, then the user possibly overrode the defaults during OS install, or else the drive has been replaced with a bigger one at some point - and the user didn't know how to delete that manufacturer partition #4 in order to grow the C: volume to fill the new space.

[MontyMan]

Thank you Mpack! One error I made was in assuming that since the /dev/sda partition was marked "boot" that the laptop actually boots it at startup. At the Minitool site I read up on what some of these partitions do; I think my best shot at doing the P2V successfully will be to bring all these over into VDIs and make them all available to the Windows VM. I'm stuck right now at the Disk2VHD stage; all partitions except the C: converted OK but the C: partition converts to the point where the progress bar appears all the way complete, but the software hangs there for hours, never successfully terminating. So I'm searching for alternative disk-to-VDI creation tools. Thanks again... Monty.

[mpack]

I think my best shot at doing the P2V successfully will be to bring all these over into VDIs and make them all available to the Windows VM

VDIs plural? That won't work. All these partitions must be in one disk (VDI) otherwise the disk contents won't make sense to the boot code.

[MontyMan]

Thanks again Mpack; I have confirmed that this works. I was able to create an image of the entire drive, then convert to VDI and compact the file, bringing it onto the target system and created a guest VM with the VDI attached. Windows up and running!

[mpack]

Well done, thanks for reporting back.

I'll amend something I said above: I said that the boot code won't be able to make sense of things if you scatter the partitions over multiple disks. In hindsight I suspect that should no longer be true in GPT (EFI) partitioned disks. Partitions in GPT are identified by UUID rather than partition index, so there should be no need any longer to locate them on a particular disk.