Walking through a Physical-to-Virtual Migration

As explained in earlier sections, you can manually capture and deploy disk images a number of ways. All methods involve booting the source system into a separate operating system and capturing an image of the attached disk. We’ll provide two walkthroughs:

• A traditional manual image capture using a WinPE boot disk and leveraging ImageX, which can be used with nearly any physical Windows system
• A simpler Disk2VHD capture for Windows XP/Windows Server 2003 or newer—give this a try first!

We’ll start with the more labor-intensive traditional imaging process. With both of these examples, remember that some of the “heavy lifting” of updating a captured VM is left to you. Using an automated tool designed for P2V migration may be a better choice.