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Showing posts from January, 2016

Converting a physical Windows installation into a virtual machine

Looking to run Linux on your computer but preserve the current Windows installation as a virtual machine? Trying to virtualize a Windows installation so you can transfer it to another computer? Using these steps you are likely to be able to take your existing physical Windows partition and convert it into a working virtual machine. I did this with a Windows 7 physical image then installing  Fedora 23 and using VirtualBox  to run Windows 7. Amazingly, to me at least, the process of creating the virtual disk image is performed from the running Windows system you'd like to virtualize. This is really convenient and much nicer than having to reinstall from scratch. disk2vhd is what enables you to do this on-the-fly virtual disk creation. It is created by Microsoft, so its kind of funny to use their tool to make it easy to convert a computer to Linux. NOTE - This level of monkeying around with operating systems and file systems does not always end well. You should back up a