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I'm looking for a way to convert a raw hard drive image (from a machine that had Windows 10 installed on it) to a bootable working virtual machine, preferable VMware based. Everything I'm finding online talks about converting a machine that is running and can have an application installed on it. In my situation I only have the raw hard drive.

EDIT: the main problem isn't converting the hard drive image to something VMware Workstation can actually read, it's finding a tool that will modify the image to allow the machine to boot and recognize the new hardware without blue screening.

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  • How was the raw hard drive image made?
    – ivanivan
    Sep 14, 2019 at 22:24
  • This could be similar to what was asked here: stackoverflow.com/questions/454899/…
    – JMill
    Sep 14, 2019 at 22:55
  • It's just a raw hard drive image. The problem isn't so much in converting the image to something a virtual machine can read but getting the machine to actually boot and recognize the different hardware, etc. Sep 15, 2019 at 12:46
  • You might want to investigate clonezilla.org - that has various capabilities that may relate to what you want to do (eg reinstallation of boot loaders). Or it may not. Sep 15, 2019 at 15:10

2 Answers 2

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(1) You use something like V2V Converter / P2V Migrator (depending on do you have an access to the disk image file or is it disk itself you need to deal with at block level).

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-v2v-converter

(2) You run conversion process and you get a resulting VM image here matching your hypervisor of choice (VMware in your case).

(3) You boot your Windows VM from (2) into so-called "Safe Mode" and allow Windows OS to rebuild its driver stacks. After it's done you're golden! Next boots your VM won't BSOD because it was installed using different hardware.

https://www.howtogeek.com/107511/how-to-boot-into-safe-mode-on-windows-the-easy-way/

P.S. You might want to install VMware Tools at some point though.

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Tools/12.1.0/com.vmware.vsphere.vmwaretools.doc/GUID-391BE4BF-89A9-4DC3-85E7-3D45F5124BC7.html

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In Windows or Linux, you can mount said disk image. You could then access create a .vmdk file; VirtualBox comes with a tool to create one using the following command:

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename "</path/to/file>.vmdk" -rawdisk /dev/sda

Windows will allow you to create a snapshot of any HD using disk2vhd. Again, you can mount the image as a volume and create the image from that - see this image: enter image description here

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  • I believe VMware Converter can convert powered off virtual machine hard drive images but will it actual work with such an image? All virtual machine hard drive images would have different drivers installed than what this image would contain. I need this image to actually boot and work as a virtual machine. Sep 15, 2019 at 12:37
  • Oh - that almost definitely won't work, as Windows is installed for certain hardware. If you boot you'll probably get a BSOD. You could boot, then go through recovery steps in Windows just as you would any machine. Better to boot a normal virtual machine, use the image as a spare drive, and get any info etc. needed off there.
    – LTPCGO
    Sep 15, 2019 at 14:37

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