I have an existing Windows installation on a hard drive that I want to virtualize. I know the process to turn a physical machine into a virtual but that relies on converting the hard drive into an img. Instead of converting to an IMG, can I just use the entire physical disk? Or at the very least, convert it to IMG, and then put it back on the disk? The motherboard and all hardware are all the same. I'm fairly certain it can be done as I'm sure I could do it in VMWare. I'm just not sure about Qemu.

Ok, if you can convert the harddrive to a vmware image then yes you should be able to do it.

Just convert the harddrive to a vmware machine.

Then you can convert the image to kvm

Check this video jonp made

 

Once converted you can format that drive in unraid and put image on the hardrive. I have converted a few vm images and run them on unraid ( windows 95 and 98!) so it should be quite possible

Just read a post giving me an idea. Maybe worth a try is to pass through the whole disk to the vm.

So setup seabios vm template but for the primary disk location pass it through. (http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=48340.0)

Although your unraid uses same motherboard as the pc hardrive has come from, i dont know if it would work as the hardware in the vm will be virtualised so it will be different so may not boot because of this. But maybe worth a go

 

 

I think if you set up hardware profiles this might work.

Just read a post giving me an idea. Maybe worth a try is to pass through the whole disk to the vm.

So setup seabios vm template but for the primary disk location pass it through. (http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=48340.0)

Although your unraid uses same motherboard as the pc hardrive has come from, i dont know if it would work as the hardware in the vm will be virtualised so it will be different so may not boot because of this. But maybe worth a go

 

Thanks that's just what I was looking for. The hardware profile shouldn't be an issue as I can use sysprep in Windows to "normalize" it. I'll probably to a write up on it and add it to the wiki.