How To Turn a Physical Computer Into A Virtual Machine with Disk2vhd

Do you wish there was a hassle free way to migrate physical machines to VMs for testing and consolidation?

Just open up the Disk2vhd folder and initiate the executable.

Youll need to select a location that is large enough to store the VHD youre creating.

In this example were creating a VHD from an IBM ThinkPad running XP.

After everything looks correct, hit the Create button.

Youre shown the progress bar while the VHD is created.

The XP VHD from an older IBM ThinkPad G40 used for this test took about an hour to complete.

The amount of time it takes to create the VHD will vary from system to system.

We need to create a new machine first, so open Windows Virtual PC from the Start Menu.

In the Virtual Machine folder select Create virtual machine to launch the wizard.

Decide the amount of memory to give to the virtual machine and select web connection prefs.

The created virtual machine will be placed in the Virtual Machines folder.

There are a few things to point out on this XP virtual machine.

Because we moved it from another computer, we need to reactivate the XP license.

The new hardware wizard will come up as XP starts pointing out different hardware detected on the virtual machine.

We found that cancelling out of those wizards worked the best.

Then we ran Enable Integration Features form the Tools menu on Virtual PC.

After the machine launches from the reboot you’re free to start using it.

Also it could be used for simply creating a backup of your rig.

It will run on Windows XP SP2 and higher.Download Disk2vhd