Migrating Win7, different motherboard/system

[I.M.O.G.]

When changing the system Win7 is connected to, usually its pretty happy about figuring out what its running on and just soldiering on. I've switched from 890FX to 990FX to z77, etc - it usually just works fine, as long as IDE/AHCI is set correctly in BIOS.

However I want a sure thing... I'm creating an image of my laptop, and I'm going to convert that image into a virtual disk, which can be loaded and ran within Virtualbox. Basically, I'm converting an existing windows install to Virtualbox. This old virtualbox doc still refers to XP and isn't relevant: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows

Any tips for making this migration more of a "sure thing"?

 

[c627627]

Will this work with later versions of Windows?
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/wi...-windows-7-virtual-machine-with-disk2vhd/3091

 

[I.M.O.G.]

I dunno, I'll give it a try next though if this fails. Still working on getting it transferred over.

 

[mbentley]

The only thing you can really need to do is to make sure to choose the right virtual hardware that most closely matches the previous system. The biggest thing to look for is picking the right type of virtual storage controller. If you were using AHCI, I would just pick a SATA controller and ensure the type is set to AHCI in Virtualbox and it should be fine. I've certainly migrated a number of Windows XP physical machines to Virtualbox machines but not a Win7 machine.

 

[I.M.O.G.]

Yup, that was it mbentley - it went really smooth, other than taking about 20 hours to copy everything necessary. About 3 of that 24 hours was spent doing dd to copy to my laptop SSD that was only 128GB in size - it didn't hit me at first that dd would create an image the same size as the original drive, NOT the same size as the actual data on the original drive. I was on a 250GB 7200RPM drive for windows, so using dd to create a raw image from that resulted in a 250GB image - which worked fine once I realized that and set the target for image creation to a spare 2TB drive I had sitting around.

I started dd last night, and it finished shortly after I woke up this morning. So then I had to convert that raw image to a vdi image (vdi is virtualbox's Virtual Disk Image). This command made that happen:

VBoxManage convertfromraw ImageFile.dd OutputFile.vdi

The first dd copy involved my 250GB 7200rpm laptop drive, the conversion to vdi went between 2 2TB drives - both took A LONG TIME.

Once it was done though I just checked the virtual sata controller was set to AHCI, it was, so I booted directly from the vdi created and everything was happy. Windows re-detected all the virtual hardware fine, so the only problem is that windows wigged out and thinks my version of windows is pirated now. I can resolve that.

That tackles 98% of my situation with getting back on linux as my main OS. My next 1% of a challenge is trying to shrink the windows.vdi file so that it isn't 250GB - I only need about 60GB for Windows, and that would fit happily on my SSD which would be a great performance bump. I'm not sure if I can successfully shrink the vdi. The other 1% is seeing if ROG connect will work from the virtual machine... I could kinda use ROG connect for benchmarking.

 

[I.M.O.G.]

Shrinking the vdi disk is easy - its automatically considered a dynamically sized disk, so instructions for compacting are pretty simple. In windows defrag, then write zeros to free space, then in the linux host run the vboxmanage command to compact:
http://tots.1o24.org/how-to-reduce-size-of-virtualbox-vdi-file/

That's underway currently. I still need to test ROG connect sometime, maybe next week I'll find time. I have an OCKey anyways, which does the same thing without a laptop (just an extra keyboard) - I could just use that if I can get that working instead.

 

[mbentley]

Very nice, glad it worked out just fine for you Converting some Server 2008 VMs just from VMware to Virtualbox, I also had the same issue where I had to re-activate Windows. I almost did the same thing with DD recently with a disk that only had 11 GB used on it. It was only a 74 GB drive but the thought of copying over all of that empty space made me think twice.

 

[I.M.O.G.]

What did you do instead? Just an image tool to grab the non-empty space?

 

[mbentley]

This was just on a Debian box so I created a new partition on my new SSDs and just copied the files themselves.