Bootable ISO from working hard drive

Question

I am looking for a way to create a bootable ISO image of an existing, working hard drive containing a master boot record.

Is there a known solution to this problem?

Background:

I have some critical scientific equipment that is running Windows XP. It is increasingly difficult to support compatible hardware. I would like to see if it can run in a virtual machine (e.g.: VirtualBox) on a more modern computer. To try this I need an iso of the existing drive.

Attempts so far

• Clonezilla lets me make images, and supposedly even make a 'recovery iso' but this does not appear to be a bootable iso of the actual drive.
• Acronis's software lets me make the bootable media and back up the drive from it, but only to some proprietary format. I don't know how I could get it working with VirtualBox.

Answer 1

Use instead the Virtual Box Physical to Virtual converter using Disk2VHD.

VBOX P to V

To convert a physical disk to virtual disk with Disk2vhd:

1. Download and extract the Disk2vhd.zip file on the computer that you want to convert to a VirtualBox machine, or on another computer where you have attached the disk of the physical machine that you want to convert to virtual.

2. From the extracted folder, right-click on disk2vhd64.exe and select Run as administrator. Then ask yes at UAC warning.

3. At Disk2vhd window:

   Uncheck the Use Vhdx checkbox. * Select the physical disk that you want to convert to virtual disk. (In this example I have connected the disk I want to convert to virtual to another pc). Select a destination folder and type a name for the created virtual disk file (e.g. "WindowsXP.vhd"). ** Finally, click Create to create the virtual disk image from the physical disk.