How to move current operating sytesm onto a hypervisor? (like the "Blue Pill"?)

Question

Is there an easy-ish (like dd?) I can "move" my current operating system (win10) onto a hypervisor ala' "Blue Pill"?

That is, like the Blue Pill exploit did, for my own machine not in a malicious way. I have win10 installed and would like to run win10 and linux side by side on a bare metal hypervisor but without having to nuke windows and reinstall it (on a hypervisor).

I was reading up on Xen but it was less and obvious how the moving-the-os part would work.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Start by creating an image of the system disk – Microsoft themselves publish Disk2vhd for creating Hyper-V format .vhd images off a running system, but it shouldn't matter what you use. (Many other commercial VM software vendors have their own P2V tools.)

Then just boot that image in your VM, making sure to use hardware that Windows has drivers for (e.g. if the original system booted from a NVMe disk, then either use NVMe on the VM or remember to enable the SATA driver before conversion).

Note: If the old system was installed using UEFI mode, and if the VM software only offers traditional BIOS, you'll have to convert the Windows disk to MBR with BIOS style boot as well. That's a separate topic...

See also:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical-to-Virtual
• https://www.veeam.com/blog/how-to-convert-physical-machine-hyper-v-virtual-machine-disk2vhd.html