Moving Windows to a virtual machine

This topic is devoted to the transfer of windows xp from a real machine to a virtual one running under VirtualBox.

Why do you need it?

I needed to update the OS on a laptop with windows xp to windows 7 with all the settings of the programs, logs in IM clients and other things. There were 2 options:

• backup the necessary files and put windows on a blank disk
• put windows 7 second system

The first option is dangerous because you can forget to save some things from the backup or it will be difficult to restore them from the backup, and the second involves adding extra garbage to the file system, as well as complicating navigation and searching.
Therefore, it was decided to make a virtual system out of a real system. It was not at all difficult.

Preparing to transfer

First of all, you need to remove all unnecessary.

• We clear the partition with the system of unnecessary files (we transfer or delete them), we try to free the partition as much as possible. This is to ensure that the resulting image takes up less space.
• We remove hardware-dependent applications and specific devices from the device manager. In my case, it turned out to be various HP applications (quick launch buttons, credential manager, and a bunch of others), as well as a touchpad driver. But I did not know about it and eventually found a little haemorrhoids after the transfer :)
• We clean autoload. You can use AVZ or similar programs that can remove applications that are launched from the registry. You can also disable non-system services (if you know why they are needed). This will help get rid of the wild brakes after the transfer, if something goes wrong.

Software installation and migration

The easiest way to transfer is to use VMware Converter. This utility will allow you to make an image from the system partition, which can then be loaded into VirtualBox. On the official website for downloading you need to go through some tricky registration, but with the help of Google, you managed to find a direct link to the distribution from the official website. As far as I remember, the program is paid, but it has a trial period of 15 days, which is enough for transfer.
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Install this program and run. We create a new task, select a local computer as a source, select hard disk partitions (here you must specify the boot and system (if they differ) partitions!). As a result of the conversion, select the other virtual machine. Next, select the place where the image will be saved (you need either a removable media of sufficient size or a network drive). As a type of virtual machine, select Workstation 5.x (for it there is support in Virtualbox for sure), the other settings can be left as default.

Now you can run the conversion and have patience, because This process is long. Make sure that your media has enough free space to store the image (NTFS file system is also desirable, since the image will be larger than 2 GB, otherwise you need to set the breakdown into 2 GB files in the converter settings).

After conversion, run VirtualBox on any machine, choose the resulting image as a hard disk and voila! we get a virtual machine (though not the fact that the worker :)). In the settings of the virtual machine, you need to check the boxes opposite ACPI and IO APIC, it is also desirable to give it more memory (if any).
Now you can start the virtual machine.

Possible problems

• It is important to choose the correct system and boot partitions. On my laptop, the recovery partition D turned out to be bootable, which I was unpleasantly surprised by. Without it, the image will not work. Shamanism with the fixboot and fixmbr commands in the recovery console did not lead to anything.
• If the system is licensed, then after the transfer, there will be problems with activation, because changing equipment.
• If the system starts up with an error, you need to try to start it in safe mode and remove incompatible devices in the device manager.

Useful information

• How to migrate existing Windows installations to VirtualBox
• The article "Castling with Windows" in the Linux Format magazine in January 2008

PS Thus, I managed to transfer the history in Skype and the Firefox profile to the new system, which did not want to be transferred by regular copying of files (I had to install additional programs). If it turns out that I forgot to move something, then you can always start the virtual machine.