Comment by _carbyau_

Comment by _carbyau_ 3 days ago

I know TheFineArticle is in Linux land but for Windows people with this issue you might look at Sysinternals Disk2vhd.[0]

It can be run from the online OS itself and it can store the resulting vhd on the same disk it is imaging (with space and disk performance constraints).

I find it handy for turning my freshly superceded gaming machine into a VM on my new machine for easy access to files, before doing whatever with my old hardware.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/dis...

miles 3 days ago

Another marvel is Tom Ehlert's Drive Snapshot[0], which supports "disk image backups of live or offline Windows 2000-2022 systems all in a portable (and bootable!) ~1MB EXE".[1]

[0] http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/index.htm

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42238451

Reply View 0 replies

accrual 2 days ago

That's pretty slick. I recently upgraded my gaming PC and made my old rig headless so I could remote in and grab files/config.

Did you uninstall any games or other large files before converting to .vhd to keep the image size down?

Reply View 1 reply

_carbyau_ 2 days ago

I keep my gaming machines for a long time and usually only upgrade the gpu in that time so the main "fast SSD" is much smaller than the "storage disk" of my new machine. But yes, I get rid of the Steam directory entirely and any large media files.
If I wanted to be more careful I could probably just do a full registry export and keep C:\Users\[username]\AppData. But rather than dig around trying to recall and export MORE stuff (when I want to be playing on the new machine...) I'll just keep a copy of the whole thing for reference.
And it'll get deleted down the track when I'm happily bedded into the new machine.
Other tips: if you moved your license for Windows to the new machine, run the VM without networking...
If you are wondering how to get stuff off it with no networking - because you are using (inbuilt to Windows Pro) hyperv instead of vmware - you can mount the VHD disks directly on your new machine while the VM is off.

Reply View | 0 replies