“Manually Performing [Windows] P2V Migration for Software Assurance” (mostly… but the tools, like Disk2VHD.exe and Virtual PC, and methods are free and available to most…)

The Windows Blog - Manually Performing P2V Migration for Software Assurance

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One common thread of contention was from people who did not have any experience with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit or System Center Configuration Manager and “just wanted something easy to perform a P2V migration, without needing to be an expert in the deployment tools.” If there was ever a loaded word here, it would be “easy.” In the next couple of pages, I’ll describe main steps performed by the automation with manual instructions. Because of a limitation in Virtual PC, the starting system needs to have a disk size smaller than 127GB – there is a note on working around this requirement at the end of the document.

In reading this step-by-step process, you’ll understand my motivation for wanting to automate the entire process – and these steps only represent a portion of what the automated tools do in P2V Migration for Software Assurance.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Does this Manual Process Still Require Software Assurance?

As with my previous blog posts, I need to stress that if you are not converting a system installed with Volume License media, the virtual machine might not work or lock you out of Windows XP and prompt for reactivation. I often read comments to P2V Migration for Software Assurance blog posts stating, “I’ll just use ‘tool x’ or ‘tool y’ to get around the Software Assurance requirements.” To be clear, using a P2V tool from a company other than Microsoft does not make the Windows licensing terms or activation technologies involved with transferring OEM-versions of Windows to new hardware go away. If you have ever removed a hard drive from an OEM-installed system and installed that hard drive in a new or different computer, that is the experience you will see when moving the P2V-converted VHD file into Virtual PC. Software Assurance with Volume License media in this case allows for the transfer of the operating system from the physical hard drive to the virtual machine.

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The important thing to note is that you still need a valid Windows Product key. So before you start playing this game, make sure your host and the OS your are virtualizing are legal and if need be you can re-activate with a valid key.

Still if you need to do the manual P2V approach, this looks like an interesting guide… If I had to do this a number of times, I’d definitely look, like the author suggests, for an automated method (be it from MSFT or not).