How to install Windows or other OS and then bring to another computer by using a physical drive and Virtual Machine with QEMU

This has been a tried and true method for Windows because it is finicky with hardware changes without a reinstall (eg BSOD on boot is what happens 9/10 times unless you move to the same hardwar).  Surprisingly, if you use a QEMU VM and do a standard install, it has worked in every system I've thrown the drive in afterwards.

So the play is this, use a USB SSD, physical SATA drive plugged internally or for convenience, you could use a SATA to USB adapter on another computer to perform the install, before you move the actual drive to the destination computer (think of saving time and not having to go to another computer until the OS is installed or if you are building an image this way is easier than working with a physical machine initially).

In this example the drive you plugged in that needs Windows is "/dev/sdj". 

Just run this QEMU command, install normally and then bring the drive to the computer that needs to run it:

qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -smp 8 -m 8096 -drive file=/dev/sdj -cdrom Win10_1607_English_x64.iso

If you need to boot EFI add this flag: 

apt install ovmf

-bios /usr/share/ovmf/OVMF.fd

Change file=/dev/sdj to the dev of your drive and -cdrom to the .iso that you want to install from.


Tags:

install, os, virtual, qemuthis, method, finicky, hardware, reinstall, eg, bsod, hardwar, surprisingly, qemu, vm, ve, usb, ssd, sata, plugged, internally, convenience, adapter, destination, installed, initially, quot, dev, sdj, _, enable, kvm, smp, cdrom, _english_x, iso,

Latest Articles

  • How To Emulate Android in Linux
  • How to use KVM and GUI inside Docker
  • python spacey ERROR: No matching distribution found for thinc<8.4.0,>=8.3.12
  • Debian 11 security repo fixes due to EOL
  • MySQL vs MariaDB how to create a socket user tutorial
  • Ubuntu Linux Mint Desktop Dark Black Cannot See Solution
  • How to combine .txt ACLs without breaking things
  • How to ping all of Googlebot's IPs script
  • 'virtio0' uses a qcow2 feature which is not supported by this qemu version: QCOW version 3
  • Linux bash script to get the IP of a list of hostnames
  • How To Use Camera Webcam in Docker for OBS Studio etc...
  • Computer Server Won't Post Boot Or Enter BIOS Setup After Installing RAID SAS or GPU Card etc..
  • How To Test PHP Scripts from CLI with GET variables/query string
  • apt-cache how to see all available versions of a package in Debian Ubuntu Mint
  • Virtualbox VBox Guest-utils drag and drop files stops working with Windows VMs
  • How To Remove Ubuntu Netplan and Go Back to /etc/network/interfaces
  • How To Force Flash an AMD Instinct GPU To Another Model Using Debian Ubuntu Mint Linux
  • How To compile ollama from source to use unsupported AMD GPU with rocm in Ubuntu Debian
  • QEMU KVM Virtio GPU Windows Cannot Select 1080P
  • Linux Gnome Desktop Ubuntu Mint Debian Gets Slower After Weeks