Back in the early 2000’s I started playing with Linux on old machines and have used Linux on an off since. Now I only have one Windows laptop that I need for a few very specific things and it’s Linux for any backend stuff. I’ve got pi’s, nucs and a NAS, all Linux now.
I am so grateful for all the hard work people have put in over the last two decades making sure we can step away from Windows without having to go to the Apple or Chrome walled gardens. I’ve made a career working in the Microsoft stack and I’m so done with them.
Now if I could just figure out how to turn my windows laptop into a VM on my ProxMox machine.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll have to dig into this. I have no qualms about pulling my HD from the laptop and cloning it, so I should be able to try a bunch of different methods until it works.
For the stuff I need to do on my laptop, RDP is all I need so it can sit on a server in the basement waiting for me to start it up when I need it.
You can also boot a live Linux on the laptop and either create the image to an external drive or tunnel it via ssh or even just netcat it to your Linux device.
No need to open up the laptop just to create a 1:1 image with dd that you then turn into an image for use in a VM.
Back in the early 2000’s I started playing with Linux on old machines and have used Linux on an off since. Now I only have one Windows laptop that I need for a few very specific things and it’s Linux for any backend stuff. I’ve got pi’s, nucs and a NAS, all Linux now.
I am so grateful for all the hard work people have put in over the last two decades making sure we can step away from Windows without having to go to the Apple or Chrome walled gardens. I’ve made a career working in the Microsoft stack and I’m so done with them.
Now if I could just figure out how to turn my windows laptop into a VM on my ProxMox machine.
Out of curiosity, what happens if you image the laptop drive and boot it under VirtualBox (keeping the Linux host offline, so the Windows guest can’t phone home)? Potentially useful: https://superuser.com/questions/614400/how-can-i-clone-a-hard-drive-directly-to-a-vdi-image
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll have to dig into this. I have no qualms about pulling my HD from the laptop and cloning it, so I should be able to try a bunch of different methods until it works.
For the stuff I need to do on my laptop, RDP is all I need so it can sit on a server in the basement waiting for me to start it up when I need it.
You can also boot a live Linux on the laptop and either create the image to an external drive or tunnel it via ssh or even just netcat it to your Linux device. No need to open up the laptop just to create a 1:1 image with dd that you then turn into an image for use in a VM.
:) Yeah I realized that after I hit send. I have been using clonezilla for years. It’s my favorite way to do full backups.