The following article covers the process of converting a physical Windows computer into a VirtualBox virtual machine image in 3 easy to follow steps. Once done, physical Windows computer can be opened as a virtual machine by using Oracle VM VirtualBox.
Requirements
Download Disk2vhd from Windows Sysinternals, at following URL: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd or directly from this url: https://download.sysinternals.com/files/Disk2vhd.zip
Instructions
STEP 1
First, we need to login onto a physical Windows machine that we are planning to clone.
Download the Disk2vhd.zip, once it is downloaded and unzipped, you’ll see the following files:
STEP 2
The next step is to use disk2vhd.exe to create VHD Image of a physical Windows machine.
Right click on disk2vhd.exe and run it as administrator. The following box will pop up:
- Select the drives you want to image
- Make sure you don’t check ‘use Vhdx’, nor ‘Use Volume Shadow Copy’
- Select the path where VHD file will be saved
- Press ‘Create’ button
Once done, you’ll see VHD file created on your hard drive:
STEP 3
The next step is to open Oracle VM Virtual Box manager and create a new Windows machine (in my case it was Windows 7).
The important part is that when it comes to creating a new Hard Disk, instead of creating a new virtual drive, we’ll use the VHD file we have created using Disk2vhd.
The following screenshot illustrates the process:
Once done, you’ll see the new VM in your VirtualBox Manager. You can press start and it’ll load. By pressing the start button, the virtual copy of your physical machine will load:
I hope this helped.