this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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Hello everyone!

I have been learning QEMU for the past day and so I've almost finished building my perfect VM from the qemu cli, and I was wondering if there is any method to say, copy a partition(+bootloader) of a physically installed system (in this case, Windows) over a hard disk image and run it with QEMU

Unfortunately I've had no luck searching online about it and I'm unsure how to proceed myself since I've never done any disk-cloning or anything like that

My best guess would be to dump the contents of the partitions into a shared folder with the VM, then use a live media to copy those contents over into the hard disk image and finally install a bootloader to work with the Windows boot manager, but I'm all ears for what anyone has to say about it.

Thanks for reading and please let me know what you know!

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

It's called physical-to-virtual, or p2v. Proxmox uses qemu under the hood, so you should be able to start from their docs to create the VM: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Advanced_Migration_Techniques_to_Proxmox_VE