How to Convert a Physical Hard Drive to a Virtual Machine

[sjj1805]

Recently, I was working on a customer’s computer which had a bad motherboard. The customer opted to go with a new computer instead of repairing the old one. Naturally, I copied all the documents, Outlook pst files, etc. to the new computer, but I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if I could create a virtual hard disk of the physical drive that I or the customer could actually boot into? However, I could not find a method to create a .vhd file from an existing hard drive, so I gave up the idea. The next day I attended a Microsoft Across America event in Gettysburg, and the Microsoft rep in his presentation mentioned that he had made a .vhd file of his wife’s old computer using a program called WinImage. I quickly jotted the name down, and today I had a chance to download the program and it does exactly what I’m after. With that lengthy introduction here are the steps you need to do to convert your physical hard drive into a Virtual Machine or .vhd file for use in Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 or a similar program.

Just for the record the physical drive I was imaging had Windows XP installed on it. The procedure is going to vary slightly for other versions of Windows.

1. Download and install WinImage. WinImage is free for 30 days after which there is a nominal $30 onetime charge. Definitely worth it.
2. Attach the physical hard drive to the computer on which you loaded WinImage. You can do this either by plugging it directly into the motherboard via an empty SATA or IDE port, or you can use a USB adapter such as this one from Amazon, which is by far the easier method.
3. Open the WinImage program. If you are running Windows Vista, make sure you run the WinImage (Administrator)mode which can be found under the WinImage folder under All Programs.
4. In WinImage, click the Disk menu item and then select “Creating Virtual Hard Disk Image from physical drive“.
5. Make sure the “Include non removable hard disk(s)â€