Import and activate a Windows installation from a bare hard drive

robgendreau

Bit poster
I've got Windows installed on a bare hard drive; it's one I yanked out of a PC that died. I can get it to mount in a USB caddy. But obviously I can't run it, and can't install any Parallels tools in it since it won't boot.

Is there a way to get this going as a VM in Parallels? perhaps clone (not migrate or transfer) to a VM? Create a Windows VM and then at least get the data over?

And finally, since this was an OEM pre-installed Windows version, is it going to be impossible to activate it with MS? I seem to recall that such OEM installations are keyed to a mobo, which has been binned.
 
Hi Robgendreau,
We can not create a Virtual Machine from a standard hard disk as it is not booting,
If you have any other Windows Virtual machine, as you were able to mount the had disk & you can connect it to Windows Virtual machine and get the data.
Please let me know if you have any other questions,
 
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