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Totally new at virtualisation. Have a fairly newly rebuilt Win 8.1 box with drivers etc up to date and before I went much further was thinking to try and run P2M using VMware 11, or the standalone converter to get a virtual instance of this.

Can this be done from the same machine, or do I need to run the process from another box on the network?

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  • It is best to place the created VHDD in another location other then the HDD you are creating a VHDD from
    – Ramhound
    Feb 28, 2016 at 18:39
  • Maybe, but can it be done? Using only one PC, say with just a C drive, can I create a P2V of the (say standalone) computer?
    – Saul
    Feb 29, 2016 at 9:22

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I have done it using vCenter Converter and it works perfectly well from inside the computer, provided that the disk on which the VM is written is not included in the conversion. The copy was of good enough quality that Windows stayed activated. You may need to register an account in order to download the product.

However, my last usage of it was on Windows Server 2003 32-bit using an MBR partition table, while I suppose that you are using Windows 8.1 64-bit with GPT and UEFI boot. This shouldn't present a problem, since VMWare KB 1016992 affirms this capability since version 5.1.x, while current version is 6.1.1.

But theory aside, the only real test is to do the conversion and see whether it works for you on your computer, and furthermore, whether Windows 8.1 stays activated after its conversion to VM. The conversion process might take hours to complete, and my advice is to include in it only the system drive.

As further note: Windows 8.1 contains Hyper-V, so you could use Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter to do the P2V conversion. I have never used this tool, so cannot discuss it from personal experience.

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