I’m ready to migrate my 1½ year old Windows 2008 installation to a virtual machine and finding out about the options run into Disk2vhd. It’s made by the Sysinternals team at Microsoft and what it does is snapshot of any drive to a VHD, virtual hard disk. The cool thing is that you can clone running Windows system with it.
The cloning is as simple as:
- download Disk2vhd and extract it to some folder.
- Start the software and choose which partition you want to clone.
- Wait for the cloning to finish, in my case this took about 50 minutes
- Copy the resulting .vhd file to your virtual machine host.
- Start your virtual machine software and make a new VM.
- Mount the disk on the VM you just made and boot.
- If everything went right you should now have a clone of your Windows system running in a VM
I just tried this and just like that I have my old Windows 2008 running in a VirtualBox virtual machine on top of OpenSolaris.
If you are migrating a Windows installation to VirtualBox you might want to check out the how-to on on the VirtualBox website.