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How to capture current windows install into a VM image (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
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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?

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[–] 19 points 4 months ago

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=progress
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