It’s much easier to move Linux installations between different machines with different hardware configurations. The process for converting a Linux virtual machine should be about the same, but without all the extra tweaks required to make Windows behave. You’ll then have to manually create a copy of the disk and convert it to a VirtualBox VDI file. If you’re feeling particularly adventerous, they do offer some unsupported instructions for converting a physical Windows computer to a VirtualBox virtual machine. This requires some registry tweaking and shutting down the computer.

VirtualBox doesn’t offer an easy graphical utility for converting a physical machine to a virtual machine. It’ll create a copy of the running Windows system as a VHD file, and you can take that VHD file to another computer and run it in Hyper-V - the converted physical system should boot up just fine as long as you launch it in Microsoft’s own Hyper-V virtual machine software. You’ll be able to select which partitions and drives you want to include in the VHD file. Run this tool on the Windows system you want to convert. This utility will convert a running Windows system to a VHD (virtual hard drive) file for use in Microsoft’s virtual machine products, such as the Hyper-V virtual machine tool included with professional versions of Windows 8 and 8.1. Microsoft offers a Disk2vhd tool - one of their many useful SysInternals utilities.

RELATED: How to Create and Run Virtual Machines With Hyper-V

Save that virtual machine to an external hard drive and boot it up on a different computer. The utility will then create a virtual machine from the current Windows system, modifying it so it will boot properly in a virtual machine program.

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