Create virtual machine using HD from dead PC
-
I have a PC I would like to virtualize but the motherboard is dead and there is no readily replaceable mb. Is this possible?
-
Slave the drive up to another computer, use something like Clonezilla to make an image to someplace.
Then create a new VM, run clonezilla to import the image, bam.
-
Damn, that sounds relatively easy!
-
What's your VM platform?
-
ATM nothing. I have to install Windows on a spare PC before I have to start this task.
-
Should be pretty straightforward.
-
So you don't have a VMWare or Hyper-V host you want to put this on.. ok, I'd take a look at something like VirtualBox.
Start by putting the drive you want to clone on SATA1, and a spare drive you have lying around on SATA2, the CDRom on SATA3 (unless you make a USB bootable Clonezilla drive, then you can skip the CDRom).
Boot from Clonezilla
Choose disk 1, and create an image of it onto the partition that already exists on disk 2.
Shutdown the machine
Install drive 3 into your spare machine
Install windows on the spare machine
install Virtual Box
shutdown the machine and install disk 2 with your image on it.
bootup the spare machine, start virtual disk, create a new VM to support your image, make sure the drive you provide to virtual disk is at least as large as the original disk 1 (or larger), then boot virtual disk from Clonezilla
choose the image on disk 2 to restore into the virtualbox VM.Boot the VM and go - you'll probably have to install virtualbox tools, and remove some old NICS, etc...
-
Thanks @Dashrender, that will help a lot. I hope to start this later today.