Possible to boot-up old Windows 7 drive on some VM?
I have a 8-9 year old Windows 7 system drive that I would like to boot into. I no longer have the hardware that the OS was running on so obviously booting this up on my latest desktop is out of the question (i am pretty sure).
Is there a way to boot this OS up on some VM/Utility or something that would allow me to login and "experience" my Windows from back then along with my programs and everything that came with it?
Thanks!
43 Answers
It’s fairly straight forward to do this. Because you have Windows 10 Pro, let’s use the free Hyper-V role that is built in.
- Enable the Hyper-v role and configure an external virtual switch:
- Use an external USB drive bay or USB to SATA adapter to hook your old drive up to your new computer. Or, if you’re adventurous just plug the old hard drive in to your new computer using a spare SATA port. The old drive should show up as one or more additional drive letters. Make a note of those drive letters.
- Use Disk2VHD to convert all drives found in the previous step to a single VHDX file. Save the VHDX file anywhere that you have enough space to hold the file. It will be at least as big as the amount of space used on the old drive. Note: You can avoid booting issues later by making sure the System partition on the old drive is included in this step. If the System partition doesn’t show up in Disk2VHD, go in to Disk Management and assign a drive letter to the old System partition then try this step again.
- Create a new generation 1 virtual machine in Hyper-V and when you are prompted to connect or create a virtual disk, use the option to connect an existing VHDX file and point it to the VHDX file you created earlier. Give the virtual machine at least 2GB of memory.
- Start your new virtual machine and connect to it and you will be using your old operating system. You do so from the Hyper-V management console.
You should install the virtual machine integration services so that your old operating system supports the features of the hyper-v environment.
Note: If Windows fails to boot you’ll need to rebuild the boot records.
To do so, you’ll need to get in to a command prompt using Windows recovery environment. If Windows doesn’t boot automatically to the recovery environment, you’ll need to use a Windows 7 setup disc or .iso added to the virtual machine and boot from it. Now run the following commands at the command prompt.
bootrec /fixmbr
diskpart
select disk 0
list partition
select partition n (n is the Windows OS partition)
active
exit (to exit diskpart)
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /rebuildbcd
exitNow reboot the computer.
11You're describing P2V which is common but it requires some skill particularly skills in troubleshooting boot problems since your legacy system was installed on particular hardware with particular drivers.
It is advised to have a Windows 7 Setup disk iso mounted in your VM as a bootable CD to perform a repair install of your VHD after you've captured a virtual hard drive since the HAL.DLL can halt the boot process and reinstalling in repair mode while in VM solves this problem.
After you solve HAL.dll (if you have the HAL.dll) issue, be prepared to boot into Safe Mode initially and start carving out un-necessary hardware drivers or applications since those devices and other parts of applications might not be present in your virtual machine hypervisor.
You'll find P2V rewarding and valuable, the experience you'll glean from this initial conversion might turn you into a P2V Warrior.
IMO you're better off to just put the drive in a physical machine and boot it up. Windows will find a bunch of new hardware and reboot several times, and you may need to provide 3rd party drivers for some of it. If you just want to "experience" your old Windows installation, then the video driver is probably the only thing you really need to worry about. If you want to keep a pristine copy of your hard drive, just image or clone it before doing any of the above.
While it's technically possible to make it boot as a VM, it's a rather tedious process with several steps involved. Probably not worth your time.
