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I have an “old” desktop computer that runs Windows 7 Pro, with a number of hard drives, where the C: drive is >500 GB. I have a new laptop that runs Windows 10, with a solid-state drive with a 200 GB capacity.

I would like to run a Window 7 Virtual Machine from my laptop that mirrors the desktop computer from and external USB hard drive. In other words, I would like to plug an external USB hard drive into my laptop and run a virtual Windows 7 machine that mirrors my “old” desktop system.

It seems like I need to do two things: mirror my desktop computer onto an external USB hard drive, and setup a Windows 7 virtual machine on my laptop. My first question is whether this is even possible. My second question is how do I find help on performing this combination of tasks (I can find help on mirroring my desktop, or on setting up a virtual machine, but not the combination)? Thank you.

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  • (1) Define “mirror”.  (2) Have you chosen a virtualization product?  If so, please identify it.  Otherwise: are you asking us which one to use?    Please do not respond in comments; edit your question to make it clearer and more complete. Jan 24, 2019 at 1:23
  • This is referred to as a "physical to virtual" migration or p2v for short. You should be able to type "<virtualization product> p2v" into google and get valid results. E.g. vmware p2v Jan 24, 2019 at 2:13

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@Scott is right when he asks you to define what exactly you mean by mirroring. We could understand it in the sense that any change on the VM should be mirrored back to the desktop in real time and vice versa, which is possible, but very complex.

Instead, for this answer, I'll assume that you want to exactly copy (convert) your old system to a VM one time and then continue to use it as a VM, not touching your old desktop any more.

This is surprisingly easy. Most beginners are not aware that a VM can run from a physical disk; at least, most virtualization software allows for this. So you could

  • clone your system disk in your old desktop to a USB disk, using tools like Acronis or CloneZilla
  • create a VM on your new laptop and configure it so that it uses the physical USB disk as VM disk (instead of a big file which usually is used as a virtual disk for VMs)

I have used similar setups in the past (not with USB disks, but with SATA disks, but this shouldn't make a big difference), with VMware player as well as VirtualBox under Windows and with QEMU / KVM under Linux.

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