Info I successfully imaged a customer's old PC's Windows installation and presented it as a virtual machine on new PC

[mikeymikec]

My previous little project here:

Info - Successfully transferred a Windows install from one disk to another without disk cloning (WIM)

I have a bit of a problem, and my experiment today gets me a (AFAIK fairly definitive) step further towards fixing said problem. Last year, I had the bright idea of using Windows's own disk mirroring system (disk management > dynamic disk > add mirror) as per Microsoft's instructions for two...

forums.anandtech.com

... gave me an idea. A customer's old PC essentially died, so I used sysinternals' disk2vhd, which created a vhdx file that Virtualbox claims to handle but apparently can't, so I followed this guide here with this command:

"C:\Program Files\Oracle\Virtualbox\VBoxManage.exe" clonemedium disk D:\path\to\image.vhdx D:\path\to\newimage.vdi --format vdi

I converted it to vdi format which VB can handle, then set up a basic Win10 VM and now I can boot the old PC's install of Windows on the new PC. Yay!

 

[Ken g6]

I'm actually surprised that worked. I thought most OEM Windows installs had a license tied to the motherboard. Maybe that's changed?

 

[mikeymikec]

I'm actually surprised that worked. I thought most OEM Windows installs had a license tied to the motherboard. Maybe that's changed?

I didn't give it an Internet connection, just in case. In this scenario I don't really care if the install ends up unlicensed, as long as I have sufficient access to it.