I’ve been running Windows on my gaming desktop and am ready to make the switch to Linux (I run arch at work and cachyOS on my personal laptop). However, I’ve got some software that I want to use that’s Windows-only, and I’d rather not replace them and re-learn from scratch. Does anyone know of any software or methods to take the currently installed Windows OS and move it into a VM image I could run on Linux?
If you have enough space and plan on using libvirt or any other virtualization technology that just lets you use img files as virtual disks, you can just dump the entire disk with dd:
(replace /dev/sda with the disk containing windows)
dd if=/dev/sda of=./windows-disk.img status=progressBear in mind that an OS image captured from a bare metal installation might fail to boot in a VM, depending on whether the original installation included the drivers needed in the VM environment. In that case, I would suggest learning about whatever recovery tools Windows offers these days, and trying to add the needed drivers.
I literally helped my brother boot into a vm from an actual windows install drive with virt manager, without even copying the disk into an image, just a couple of weeks ago. Some features might not work like 3d acceleration and such but the vm boots, you can login, access the desktop and go about whatever you need to do. AFAIK a VM emulates standard compliant hardware that windows should always be able to boot into, otherwise even just the installation iso would fail to boot.