Post #1295976
2025-11-05 13:41 UTC
@raymaccarthy
I want to do this! I want to take the Win7 that's legitimately on my old laptop, and make it be the same legit Win7 on top of a VM on Linux, probably Debian. So I'm curious to hear your process of setting that up & what VM you're on. Any advice? Have you done a writeup by any chance?
Replies (1)
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@curiousicae@tech.lgbt 2025-11-07 18:17
@unchartedworlds Don't have a write-up or link unfortunately, but I once (long ago) followed a guide to create a VMDK (or whatever VMWare's disk format is called) referencing a physical disk partition, so I could run the same Windows 7 directly or as VM inside VirtualBox on Linux. It complained about licensing due to the “hardware” changing. Converting that disk image file to VirtualBox's native format resulted in a VM only copy. But searching for something like “VBoxManage create disk image from physical partition” / “VirtualBox disk image for physical partition reference” should find you something helpful for VirtualBox. @raymaccarthy