Converting old dual-boot laptop drive to virtual machine dri…

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Author: Steven via PLUG-discuss
Date:  
To: plug-discuss
CC: Steven
Subject: Converting old dual-boot laptop drive to virtual machine drive image
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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