Computer image?

Computer Hardware & Server Infrastructure Builds
1

Hi i was wandering if anyone knows a way of imaging a windows or linux computer so that it can be turned into a iso and then mounted in a VM so we can look at the computer without having to keep the actual computer and or the NVME drive?

2

vmware has a p2v solution I’ve never used it but am aware of it.

3

thanks ill look into that

4

For Windows you can use disk2vhd, doesn’t make an ISO, but you may be able to import it into your hypervisor. Worked fine for me through VirtualBox on an old XP machine that I needed to keep running after the hardware failed.

Also Tom has a recent video of how to bring a vhd into XCP-NG, I haven’t tried it, but it is something I have on my list to do when I get time. Note that recent versions of XCP-NG do not support XP anymore, not sure how far back they currently support since going forward I’m only looking at Server 2016 or newer.

5

thanks for the info! We are not allowed to use XCP-NG though my manager really wants to have it so that we can spin up the computer in a VM at the least and its giving me nothing but road blocks.

6

It was super easy to set up mine in VirtualBox. The mainboard was having an issue from a failed power supply, and I got it working one last time and grabbed a disk2vhd and I think a clonezilla image.

I Just remembered, Tom also did a recent video on using Clonezilla to move a physical to VM (or the other way around), this might be a good way for you to do this. Summary:

-Boot source computer from Clonezilla disk

-Boot destination VM from Clonezilla image

-Clone from source to destination over network

-Eject Clonezilla disks and reboot the destination to see if it worked.

There are of course more steps, but this might get the work done for you with free tools and should work in just about any virtual environment. That said, I have not done this, but is again on my list of things to try when time permits.

7

Yeah thanks it does sound easy, im going to try that for sure. I did get it so that i can at least see the files when the system i was testing got cloned to a external hard drive so we can see the files but my manager does not understand that the files are all we need and not a functioning computer but my issue is getting the “copy done” for linux cause in our company we have a mixture of windows and linux computers. But if you have any ideas for at least being able to copy the files as a whole to our internal storage.

8

Copy the files to a drive and build VirtualBox VMs. VirtualBox doesn’t take resources if it isn’t running.