[fChk]

My current boot has become a graveyard of M$ OSes :-) The default path is grub2 bootloader -> Fedora
bootmanager -> Win7
           -> WinXP
           -> Win8.1
           -> Win10

As a result, I'll still be using Win7 when needed (as I'm still using WinXP when I need to.) Nothing really changes for me. My occasional use of M$ OSes is mainly for testing legacy stuff on EOL systems or developmental purposes on Win8.1 and Win10. Production-wise: impact 0.

Lately, I was busy revamping my home PC. Too much legacy stuff was laying around while not needed any more.

My boot was as stated in the quote above. What wasn't mentioned is that I'm using 3 disks: one for Fedora Linux, one for WinXP-Pro-SP3, Win7-Ult-SP1 and Win8.1-Pro and a third for Win10-Pro.

The plan was to virtualize WinXP-Pro-SP3, Win8.1-Pro and Win10-Pro then remove them from my boot, leaving only Win7-Ult-SP1 along with Fedora's grub2 as default.

The strategy was essentially as stated below:

If you really want to stick with your current system, I would suggest to convert it to a VHD VM then convert it to a QEMU disk image (qcow2) which you would then use in KVM. It's a bit advanced stuff but doabale with the right assistance/guidelines.

This is not the first time I was doing this P2V (Physical-to-Virtual) migration, but it's the first time I'm doing it for high-value (non-expandable) systems holding years  of work (even decades in the case of WinXP) that I can't afford to lose.

The KVM virtualization process went as planned with few tweaks here and there; the actual process will probably be documented subsequently in a thread/topic. Suffice to say that I've used the qemu-img tool to convert Win-10 disk directly to qcow2 disk file format while I've used the classic windows internal tool disk2vhd to convert the 2TB-partition-rich disk into VHD files holding discrete system partitions that were cleaned up before conversion to the qcow2 format.

Once system disks were available, the next hurdle is to fix the broken boot process, which is easily fixed in the case WinNT 6.x systems but not for WinNT 5.2 (ie winXP.)

The problem with Windows XP was not only its need for its own nt52 boot but also and above all getting the qemu BIOS and the native disk controller to talk to each other in the first place. So be mindful of that when (for some odd reason) you're still caring for a WinXP system.

Anyway, won't bother you with the 'techy' stuff, the summary here is that if you find yourself 95% of your time always logged in to your Linux system while your other Windows system 'rot' in their partition, it may be time to virtualize them (if of course you have the ad-hoc hardware specs: storage, memory, CPU hardware virtualization capability.)

Thus beside having your windows system at hand inside your Linux environment, virtualization makes also archiving and future migration possible and straightforward.