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Physical Install to QEMU VM, is it possible?

Hello everyone!

I have been learning QEMU for the past day and so I've almost finished building my perfect VM from the qemu cli, and I was wondering if there is any method to say, copy a partition(+bootloader) of a physically installed system (in this case, Windows) over a hard disk image and run it with QEMU

Unfortunately I've had no luck searching online about it and I'm unsure how to proceed myself since I've never done any disk-cloning or anything like that

My best guess would be to dump the contents of the partitions into a shared folder with the VM, then use a live media to copy those contents over into the hard disk image and finally install a bootloader to work with the Windows boot manager, but I'm all ears for what anyone has to say about it.

Thanks for reading and please let me know what you know!

16 2

Here be dragons. But basically:

  • Run a VM from contents of a physical disk: use ’dd’ to create disk image. If on linux, try to boot and fix all the errors, hopefully few.
  • Run VM as physical machine: other way around.

You won’t find this in a tutorial. You need to understand concepts, read manuals, fit everything together, execute, fail and retry until it works.

For Windows, I have no idea. Conceptually, I figure it’s similar.

The Host is Linux (arch, btw) so just the guest would be Windows and im ready to squash errors too, so thanks for the heads up
This entry was edited (17 hours ago)
Yes. set your CD in the VM to a linux distro iso like Linux, set boot from the CD in the vm, then you can use all the tools on your ISO to do whatever you want to the vm.