Windows 10 P2V - Physical to Virtual

My Setup

I am adding a compute node to an existing proxmox cluster.

I bought a used i7 Windows 10 machine with a 512 GB NVMe drive. On the outside are two COA stickers, one for Windows 10 Pro, and another for H&S Office 2019.

The current OS boots and the copy of Office works.

Goal: I want to keep this install of Windows 10 working, and copy the OS into Proxmox. I want to virtualize this OS.

This will give me a working licensed copy of Office.

Theory

I just need to get the "data" onto the VM.

The physical machine and the VM need to be able to ping each other.
Installing the drivers ahead of time should make the OS bootable.
Copying the data should preserve the OS and applications.
Copying the partitions should make recovery easier.
Rebuilding the boot information should make the OS bootable.

A lot of this is to enable a clean "recovery" of the OS once it's copied over. My copy of Windows 10 relies on:

FAT32
NTFS - This filesystem should really only be checked using Microsoft's own tools.
BCD - Boot Configuraiton Data
GPT
EFI
MSR

Dataloss

These tools cause dataloss.

A typo will destroy a filesystem.

Before doing this, practice both making and recovering bare metal restores (BMRs) ... I used Clonezilla.

BMR is usually device-to-image, or image-to-device.

Here are the docs for using Clonezilla.

My Windows 10 BMR is 11GB stored as bzip2.

If Possible Just Clone the Disk

I wanted to go from a larger drive (512GB) to a smaller drive (64GB). That meant instead of copying the devices, I needed to copy the partitions, after resizing them.

drive-to-drive cloning would be much easier.

Download ISOs

Most of the time was spent inside of recovery OSes, working with unmounted filesystems.

SystemRescue - Linux recovery media with NTFS support.

Windows 10 Installation Media - This is also the recovery disk. It can be made on the host being virtualized. This is needed to fix, BCD (Boot Configuariton Data) and EFI problems.

Clonezilla - A bare metal recovery tool.

Preparing Windows 10 to be virtualized

My Windows 10 machine had some extras on it I didn't want to virtualize.

Create a restore image with Clonezilla

This is the failsafe image, before touching anything. I saved mine to a samba share, but it can be saved anywhere it will fit that isn't on the device.
Turn off the hibernation file

Via the command prompt as an administrator:

powercfg -h off
Clean up the hard disk

Into the search box type:

Disk Cleanup
Set the virtual memory pagefile to 1024MB

A file of this size is needed for coredumps, errors, and logging.

Follow these instructions.
(Optional) Run WinDirStat to look for odd or large files

Delete or Uninstall them.

Windows Directory Statistics - WinDirStat
Run chkdsk on C:

Via the command prompt as an administrator:

chkdsk C: /R

/R - "Locates bad sectors and recovers readable information (implies /F, when /scan not specified)"

Reboot
(Optional) - Create another restore point with Clonezilla

This is the cleaned image, to save all the clean up work.
Boot GParted

This is where it gets dangerous. GParted can be used to resize offline NTFS partitions.
Resize the "Basic data partition"

My data partition was 410GiB. I resized it down to 48GiB. The data on the partition is 25GiB.
Move the "Recovery" partition

I used the GUI to slide it over.
Save your work with GParted

Click the green checkmark. This writes the changes to disk.
Boot into Windows 10

Check to make sure the OS is still sane. Does the Internet work?
Run chkdsk again on C:

This is done to make sure the filesystem is OK.

Via the command prompt as an administrator:

chkdsk C: /R

/R - "Locates bad sectors and recovers readable information (implies /F, when /scan not specified)"

Reboot
(Optional) - Create another restore point with Clonezilla

This is the prepared image.
Boot into SystemRescue

Creating the Virtual Machine

I used PVE - Proxmox Virtual Environment as my hypervisor. Any hypervisor should work.

I used the Proxmox GUI to assign the VM a hard disk of 64GB.

I boot the VM with SystemRescue, and make sure it can get a working IP address.

Preparing the Hard Drive on the Virtual Machine

There are four partitions on my windows 10 machine. I want to copy them over-the-network using netcat.

Both - Boot SystemRescue
Both - Open GParted
Destination - Using GParted, recreate the partition structure on the new hard disk

I used a mix of fdisk and the GUI for this.
- Created a GPT Partition Table
- Copied the partitions including the start and stop sectors, exactly.
- Copied the flags
I started with four partitions on both and ended with four partitions. They all fit on this smaller disk.
Destination - Turn off the firewall

systemctl stop iptables
Destination - Get the IP Address

ip a
Destination - Turn on the small service netcat

This needs to be done for each partition, one at a time.

nc -l -p 19000 | bzip2 -d | dd of=/dev/sda1
Source - Redirect dd into bzip into netcat, throw traffic at the Destination

This needs to be done for each partition, one at a time.

dd bs=16M if=/dev/nvme0n1p1 | bzip2 -c | nc <ip_address> <port>

Windows 10 Recovery

I went from a NVMe drive to a IDE drive. I still needed to recover the bootdata.

Destination - Load the ISO for the Windows Recovery Environment.

Click Repair your computer

Click Troubleshoot

Click Command Prompt

I followed this guide to repair the boot info.

Look at the new VM disk

diskpart

This leads to the DISKPART> prompt.
Verify the disk is GPT.

Under "GPT" there should be a star.
Select Disk 0

This is the only hard disk in this VM.

sel disk 0

List the partitions and Volumes

This is the windows equivalant to fdisk.

list partition

list volume

This is my lab system.

DISKPART> list partition 

   Partition ###   Type            Size        Offset
   -------------   --------------  ----------  -------
   Partition 1     System          100 MB      1024 KB
   Partition 2     Reserved        16 MB       101 MB
   Partition 3     Primary         46 GB       117 MB

DISKPART> list volume 

   Volume ###  Ltr     Label       Fs      Type        Size        Status      Info 
   ----------  ---     ----------  -----   ----------  -------     ----------  -------
   Volume 0    D       ESD-ISO     UDF     CD-ROM      4667 MB     Healthy  
   Volume 1    C                   NTFS    Partition     46 GB     Healthy  
   Volume 2                        FAT32   Partition    100 MB     Healthy     Hidden

There are the three required volumes.

NTFS - The data partition, apps and the OS
EFI - Extensible Firmware Interface. Where the modern boot system lives. Usually 100MB, FAT32
MSR - Microsoft System Reserved. Usually 16MB formatted as "MSR". Used by Windows to help manage the file partitions

At this point, I could just follow along with the Windows OS Hub article, to restore the BCD bootloader configuration.

References

Windows OS Hub - How to Repair EFI/GPT Bootloader on Windows 10 or 11

Microsoft - Disk cleanup in Windows

Ten Forums - How to Manage Virtual Memory Pagefile in Windows 10

Microsoft - BCD Boot Command Line Options

Windows OS Hub - How to repair deleted EFI partition in windows 7

Ariadne's Network Notes