Migrating Windows (or any partition) to a Virtual Machine

At the company I work for, being sick of making clean Windows installs, we decided to willingly violate Windows XP’s EULA for the greater good and put together a few open-source tools (basically ntfsclone, ntfsreloc, ntfsresize, gparted and of course, Linux), wrote a couple of witty scripts and came out with a “free” and nearly legal way of (re)installing Windows on our machines.

Such a method consists basically of having in each machine besides the live Windows installation, a striped out Linux system with a backup image of its Windows (legally registered!). Of course, to save time, we sometimes use that same image to install Windows in more than one than one machine and once it’s been installed, we change the license data and create a new internal backup image with its own license info.

So, I have that set up on my machine as well, except that I have a full, lovely, amazingly useful Debian installation. The problem is, that I can’t be bothered to close, abandon whatever I’m doing and leave my happy place just to boot 5 minutes into Windows, figure out how to do something or test a new script and boot back into Linux to resume my other activities.

Here comes Virtualisation to the rescue, being something I had played with in the past, it wasn’t totally new and I already knew about the different options out there and their pros and cons.

So I decided to give it a shot, but once again, making a fresh Windows install with all of the software needed to make it useful… is just too much of a burden.