I’ve been running Windows on my gaming desktop and am ready to make the switch to Linux (I run arch at work and cachyOS on my personal laptop). However, I’ve got some software that I want to use that’s Windows-only, and I’d rather not replace them and re-learn from scratch. Does anyone know of any software or methods to take the currently installed Windows OS and move it into a VM image I could run on Linux?
There are many ways, many programs, and many processes that you could step through. Figure out what VM software you will use under Linux to pick your virtual disk file format, the sort when you are going to backup your existing install, and if anything is in your way like disk encryption.
If you can boot a live linux or pull the drive, look at qemu-img, I haven’t used it myself in awhile for syntax but Google suggests a command like this will work for you
sudo qemu-img convert -f raw -O qcow2 -p /dev/sdX /path/to/disk.qcow2