Windows 2 Virtual

Published: by Creative Commons Licence

Time to read: Less than 1 minute

The following quick guide describes how to create a VirtualBox image of an existing Windows system.

  1. Crate a VHD image of the running system with the tool 'Disk2Vhd' from Microsoft. Partitions can be left out if not necessary for the system bootup. Source: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx
  2. Copy the VHD image to the computer which runs Virtual Box.
  3. Create a new virtual machine with Virtual Box (e.g. Windows → Windows 7 (64 bit)).
  4. Select the VHD image as existing image.
  5. Virtual Box integrates the selected image as AHCI disk. This results in a blue screen when Windows starts up. To fix the problem in the virtual machine settings delete the AHCI partition with the VHD image and mount it as IDE partition. Source: http://www.buchatech.com/2010/12/blue-screen-of-death-booting-hyper-v-vhd-in-virtualbox/
  6. Boot Windows. If the virtual machine is running on a Mac, there are problems with the keyboard. To solve this, you can set up a keyboard profile. Source: http://www.batchnummern.info/parallels_keyboard_english