Random old computer parts and monitors on the floor .
17 computers and no furniture

“I know a guy” question of the day: Converting old physical devices into VMs

by Brian

Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, Systems Engineer, Papa, and eccentric individual.

I am constantly conflicted with building my LinkedIn and online persona, and my desire for privacy and anonymity.

I had a fun question show up this morning from a friend, looking for guidance on converting their old pile of PCs and macs into VMs. On an enterprise basis, this was not an uncommon strategy about a decade ago, but really has fallen out of fashion. I can see why folks on the consumer side would have interest in this. I also have several old machines, and have occasionally thought of having my old PCs as VMs. Turns out it’s not worth the time for the typical family or household, and my advice is summarized as:

 

DNDIY – DO NOT DO IT YOURSELF

Make sure this is really worth the effort. In my experience it’s highly unlikely to be worth the effort, and getting the data you care about is actually the priority, and that is usually just copying tons of stuff to a large USB, and then running through a de-duplication process/software to make sure you only have one copy of stuff. This focuses on what most folks are actually after, and all the fun techie-stuff that has potential to suck a ton of time is avoided. I highly recommend Duplicate Cleaner from DigitalVolcano if you have access to a PC. I dislike paying for software if a free version is available, but this is some of the best money I’ve dropped and will recommend it to anyone cleaning up old disks.

If you do need to convert a machine:
Understand what your original device and target machine are. This significantly changes what your options are. The original requestor had old Windows-based PCs and macOS devices. Any other combination is going to require different instructions than written here.
  1. Install VMware Fusion on the intel-based mac. It’s free, but Broadcom does make it challenging to navigate their portal.
    1. https://www.vmware.com/products/desktop-hypervisor/workstation-and-fusion#resources
  2. Try the Microsoft SysInternals tool called “disk2vhd”
    1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd
    2. Try for the .vhdx format if possible
    3. Try to disable or remove Bitlocker protection from the original machine prior to capturing it. This will reduce unnecessary troubleshooting on the other side.
      1. However, please note that the old hard drive is now unencrypted, so make sure to take appropriate steps to fully purge the drive of data before you give the disk away.
    4. Your new “device” may have bluescreens and boot issues, but technically your data is there.
      1. Much of this can be troubleshooted and get the new VM stable, but it has a lot of potential to fail.
  3. For old macOS devices, you are likely to be best served by using a paid tool like CarbonCopy
    1. https://bombich.com/
    2. An alternative is to create a Time Machine backup of the original device and restore it to a new macOS VM created using the following steps:
      1. https://blog.simonelberts.nl/2022/11/macos-ventura-with-vmware-fusion.html
        1. There are other blogs and guides out there, I just happened to work with this guy at one point and know it works.
If you have any other questions let me know, there are a lot of ways to do this, but I do want to stress this is unlikely to be a trivial amount of work.

Leave a Reply