How to convert physical Windows PC into a virtual machine
After 10 years of running my main desktop computer on Windows 7 – time has finally come to upgrade it to Windows 10. Along with some hardware upgrades that my computer needed, I also wanted to move to the Windows 10 since the support and updates for Windows 7 will be discontinued on January 14th 2020.
Also, my 10 year old Windows 7 PC had a lot of settings and pieces of data that I didn’t want to give up that easily, so I got an idea to make a copy of the current Windows 7 as a virtual machine, so in case I need anything I could just boot the virtual machine and within seconds go back to my Windows 7 setup with all access all data and settings.
Making the virtual machine out of my Windows 7 PC
First step was to make a bootable copy of my computer’s hard drive partitions. For this purpose I used Disk2vhd tool made by Microsoft. It’s a free tool and all I needed to do is just pick partitions I want to backup and tell it where to back that up.
![](https://geektnt.com/static/2019/11/Disk2vhd.png)
Ideally, you would want back this up on another drive (so the backup process is quicker since one drive just reads, while other one is just writing). My C: partition was 250gb and it was roughly 45% full and the result was a Windows7.vhdx file of roughly 100 GB in size. That was copy of my Windows 7 PC installation in one big file.
Continue Reading →