Migrating Physical Machines (Windows 10 & Opensuse)

[rathol obcheek]

Dear all, after installing Qubes 3.2.1 on a laptop (HP 255 G5), I want to migrate the Windows system previously installed on there. Furthermore, there is an Opensuse (Leap 15.1) installed on a second laptop I want to migrate into Qubes as well.

My thought is to image both operating systems with a cloning tool such as Clonezilla.

I would really appreciate any kind of support from people willing to share similar experiences, thanks in advance.

[Claudia]

rathol obcheek:

Interesting question. I don't know enough about the specifics, but you
might find this helpful: https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/standalone-and-hvm/

For example it covers how to convert a VirtualBox VM to Qubes. I imagine
it would be pretty much the same process for a physical machine, once
you clone the drive to a file.

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That's done, it wasn't that easy.

Basically, I made on another Linux box a raw image of the disk containing the Windows installation:

qemu-img convert /dev/sdX -O raw /path/to/saved/image/Windows10.raw

Then shrunk it to the desired size:

qemu-img resize --shrink /path/to/saved/image/Windows10.raw  -[SIZE DIFFERENCE]G

Attached external drive to VM template Debian by running in dom0 terminal (in my case /dev/sda):

qvm-block -a debian-9 sys-usb:sda

After mounting drive in VM template with saved image, I run in dom0 terminal:

qvm-run -p debian-9 'cat "/mount/point/Windows10.raw"' > Windows10.raw

Then created Windows 10 HVM by running (whereas -r copies, -R moves):

qvm-create -H -r/R Windows10.raw -s -m 4096 -l [COLOUR] [VM NAME]

Now, the VM boots from the virtual disk, but my Qubes version seems to handle only 4 GB RAM out of 8. This is cause for complaints such as insufficient memory to start the VM, sometimes it takes a couple of attempts to succeed.