Customizer Posted January 29, 2023 Share Posted January 29, 2023 Hi, im totaly new in VMs and just wanted to know if it is possible to create an VM duplicate of an already existing notebook. Im running this (crappy old) notebook because im having some special software on it which i bougt some years ago and because the companies doesn't exist anymore i cant reactivate on different system. It is running on Win 10 64. So my generall thougt was to use a tool to create an image file or some other kind of duplication tool, then create VM and use the image to restore the system in VM environment. But im not sure if possible or not. Would be nice when someone could describe some steps how to do it, when possible.. Thanks Quote Link to comment
Kilrah Posted January 30, 2023 Share Posted January 30, 2023 See https://virtuallyfun.com/2018/01/15/converting-a-physical-disk-to-a-virtual-disk-with-qemus-qemu-img-on-windows/ You can connect that machine's drive to your server, find its identifier in unassigned devices, then run qemu-img convert -f raw -O qcow2 -S 4k /dev/sdX [destination]/image.qcow2 Destination needs to be big enough to hold up to the source drive's size. Then create a VM with that image as virtual disk. Note that depending on how that software's licensing works it might deactivate itself if it's checking whether it's still running on the same machine. Quote Link to comment
Customizer Posted February 13, 2023 Author Share Posted February 13, 2023 Thank you sooo much for your help. That would be exact the needed solution. But unfortunetly it is a Surface Book. So I can't easily take out the drive 😞 also it is an m1 ssd drive so I would need to buy external adapter to connect. Is there another possibility? to take a snapshot of the drive to an external device? then connect the device as unassigned device and continue with your described approach? That would help alot. Quote Link to comment
Kilrah Posted February 13, 2023 Share Posted February 13, 2023 You could create a linux live USB, boot from that, connect an external drive, and run the imaging from the internal drive to a file on the external. 1 Quote Link to comment
ghost82 Posted February 16, 2023 Share Posted February 16, 2023 (edited) On 2/13/2023 at 10:58 AM, Kilrah said: connect an external drive Another option is to save the image on a shared drive (like a samba drive), but yes, booting from a live linux distro is the right way to go. Edited February 16, 2023 by ghost82 Quote Link to comment
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