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Vendoran
Asked: 2009-05-22 19:26:03 +0800 CST

2nd Bootable partition P2V conversion

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I have a dual boot machine (Win7 RC and Win2008) and want to migrate one of the partitions (Win2008) into a Virtual Hard Drive and the be able to use it in VPC or Virtual Server (not Hyper-V).

The ways I've seen via Linked Virtual Disks or WinImage take the entire physical drive instead of just the partition. Any ideas?

Thanks in Advance,

--Aaron

virtualization windows windows-server-2008 windows-7 virtual-drive

3 Answers

  1. Can you image the target partition and restore it onto another PC as a single boot OS? Then you can convert it without the complications.

    But is this really necessary? In my limited playing with MS SCVMM I'm sure it converts partitions rather than physical disks. If fact I think it converts each partition to a separate vhd file.

    John Rennie

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  2. Disclaimer: I work for Quest, but I'm not saying this in a sales capacity or anything, just answering the question.

    Vizioncore's vConverter does it:

    http://www.vizioncore.com/products/vConverter/

    Here's a blurb about it on TechTarget:

    http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid94_gci1349624_mem1,00.html

    I haven't used this personally. I've done the same thing with VMware's vCenter Converter product, but that only works if you want to end up with a VMware virtual machine, not a Microsoft VHD.

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  3. Best Answer

    To expand on Vendoran's comment:

    The original partition can be captured into a WIM file by using the Windows Automated Install Kit (aka WAIK) tool ImageX.exe, and then converted to a VHD using the referenced Wim2Vhd

    e.g.

    imagex.exe /capture C:\ p2vimage.wim P2VImage "Captured Physical Partition"
wim2vhd.wsf /wim:p2vimage.wim /sku:P2VImage /vhd:p2vimage.vhd
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