Vista - Create a VHD Image of my laptop

I am running Windows XP Professional on my laptop and want to create a VHD
Image of it that I can run in Virtual PC 2007. Any ideas on how I can do
this?

On Thu, 2 Oct 2008 10:50:02 -0700, Brian R <Brian
R@xxxxxx> wrote:
This is a p2v (physical to virtual) conversion and it has been
discussed at some lengths here. The main problem is that the laptop
probably has quite recent hardware whereas the VPC guest emulates a
fixed and quite old hardware configuration, for example lacking USB
totally.

So you need something that can handle this. Acronis with Universal
Restore is said to be quite good but I have not tested it myself.
What I *have* tested is the VMWare converter for making a virtual
clone of a physical machine. That worked but was a longish process and
requires you to have a VMWare Workstation license (not free).
Before that I once tried to do a simple Ghost conversion of a laptop
but failed miserably, not even a repair install of XP managed to get
it going without bluescreening.

Bottom line is that it is not easy and you will have to test it
yourself. Depending on hardware you might and might not succeed....

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)

"Brian R" <Brian R@xxxxxx> wrote in message
newsFE1EB2E-29D5-4DD2-BAED-8454484302E5@xxxxxx
HI Brian,

Further to the advice that Bo has given, there is another problem here in
that the copy of XP on your laptop is most likely OEM and tied to the
laptop, probably BIOS locked. You would not be able to use it in a virtual
machine. Then there is the licensing issue - you would need a new license
for any operating system installed in a virtual machine.

--
Jane, not plain 64 bit enabled :-)
Batteries not included. Braincell on vacation ;-)
MVP - Windows Desktop Experience

>This is a p2v (physical to virtual) conversion and it hasAfter reading enough information on the p2v conversion I am somewhat
confused. I have been using a .vhd file that was created three years ago. I
have used in on at least three different destops and other have used in on
probably another 3 or 4. In those years the hardware differences and driver
versions must have been very different.

Why would a virtual machine created three years ago work on presumedly so
many machines which are somewhat different hardware wise, but a ghost of one
machine cannot be installed into a new virtual machine.

It would seem the current virtual machine somehow resolves the hardware
differences when copied to each machine and started so it would seem creating
a new virtual machine and loading a ghost would resolve the issues as well.

-----------------------

If I were to speculate, I assume to load a ghost image you must first create
the virtual machine and install the OS which fixes the virtual machine for
that PC. If the ghost was of a different PC with different hardware, you
would get an immediate conflict.

But if this were true, could I create a ghost of computer A, create a
virtual machine on computer A, restore the ghost of computer A on the virtual
machine. Once that was done, copy the .vhd to computer B and have it work?
--
There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand binary and those that don't
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
================================
3.14159 + Ice Cream = Pi ala mode


"Bo Berglund" wrote:

On Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:11:00 -0700, Jeff Tressler
<JeffTressler@xxxxxx> wrote:
When you talk about a VHD file as being used on different systems I
assume that you really man that you have used the VHD file as the hard
disk of VPC guests running on these different platforms, right?

Then you have actually used it in a hardware environment thta has
*not* changed because what a virtual machine (the guest) sees as the
hardware is what VirtualPC supplies to it as *emulated* hardware and
this does not change at all when you go to different host systems.
The only two items taken from the host system is the CPU and RAM,
everything else is emulated and fixed.
If you take an image of a running physical machine using Ghost or
Acronis or any other of the different imaging products avilable you
will make a bit-by-bit copy of the hard drive of that PC. This then
includes all of the active hardware drivers needed to run Windows on
that physical machine.

Now, if you restore this on a virtual machine you will do so to a PC
with old and limited hardware that does not compare to the hardware on
the PC ffrom where you took the image. This is why it will not work
directly.
No, VPC does not have to "resolve" anything, it creates the exact same
emulated hardware environment for every virtual machine irrespective
of which host platform it runs on.
No, as stated above the physical PC VPC is running on does *not*
reflect back on the hardware visible inside the virtual machine, it is
still the old emulated system that is provided by the VPC host
application.

Your mistake is simple:
You have wrongly assumed that the virtual machine sees the same
hardware as the host runs on and this is simply not the case!

Everything else in your discussion originates from this mistake.

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)