Last year when I was feeling financially comfortable (literally less 
than a month before a series of car issues started that resulted in 
trading in a not-yet-paid-off car) and finally bought a new laptop and 
at roughly the same time bought an ssd and more RAM for the former main 
daily driver laptop to make it a better carry around beater laptop. I 
still have the hard drive that had been in the laptop sitting nearby 
(which shipped with Window 8 and by the time it was retired was a 
Linux/Window 10 dual boot setup) for potential reuse, but I've wondered 
if anyone around here has experience converting a yanked drive into a 
drive image for a virtual machine.

This was an idea that just popped into my head last night and the 
results of the quick web searches I did were mostly assuming two things: 
That you were primarily a Windows user wanting to virtualize a live 
desktop or server, so "Just go grab this Microsoft tool that will 
produce a hyper-v drive image and if you're using some other 
virtualization environment use its tools to convert that,"; and pretty 
much all the ones I saw were assuming you had one main partition and 
that you were just grabbing that. If I wanted something that more or 
less thought it was the old laptop is it actually as simple as just 
using dd to slurp up the whole drive into a laptop.img file and then 
pointing QEMU's QEMU-IMG tool at that file to convert it into one of the 
standard virtual drive formats? Also, if anyone knows a good M to go 
RTF, pointers to good documentation is always appreciated.

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