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I'm looking for a way to convert a raw hard drive image (from a machine that had Windows 10 installed on it) to a bootable working virtual machine, preferable VMware based. Everything I'm finding online talks about converting a machine that is running and can have an application installed on it. In my situation I only have the raw hard drive.

EDIT: the main problem isn't converting the hard drive image to something VMware Workstation can actually read, it's finding a tool that will modify the image to allow the machine to boot and recognize the new hardware without blue screening.

Harry Muscle
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2 Answers2

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(1) You use something like V2V Converter / P2V Migrator (depending on do you have an access to the disk image file or is it disk itself you need to deal with at block level).

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-v2v-converter

(2) You run conversion process and you get a resulting VM image here matching your hypervisor of choice (VMware in your case).

(3) You boot your Windows VM from (2) into so-called "Safe Mode" and allow Windows OS to rebuild its driver stacks. After it's done you're golden! Next boots your VM won't BSOD because it was installed using different hardware.

https://www.howtogeek.com/107511/how-to-boot-into-safe-mode-on-windows-the-easy-way/

P.S. You might want to install VMware Tools at some point though.

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Tools/12.1.0/com.vmware.vsphere.vmwaretools.doc/GUID-391BE4BF-89A9-4DC3-85E7-3D45F5124BC7.html

BaronSamedi1958
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In Windows or Linux, you can mount said disk image. You could then access create a .vmdk file; VirtualBox comes with a tool to create one using the following command:

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename "</path/to/file>.vmdk" -rawdisk /dev/sda

Windows will allow you to create a snapshot of any HD using disk2vhd. Again, you can mount the image as a volume and create the image from that - see this image: enter image description here

LTPCGO
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