Original Article can be found here:
http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/Disk2VHD-VirtualBox-laptop-data_recovery,2-418.html
First off, we need our ingredients, and in this case that amounts to:
- A functioning hard drive from the dead system
- A Desktop system to serve as a virtual host
- A method to connect the hard drive to the virtual host
- Microsoft’s free P2V tool, disk2vhd
- Oracle’s VirtualBox, a free desktop virtualization hypervisor
Step one is to remove the hard drive from the notebook computer
The next step involves connecting the hard drive to a host machine. Connect using SATA and power cables. However, that means partially disassembling the host PC. Alternatives include using an eSATA connector, if the host machine is so equipped, or using a USB to hard drive connection kit. Those kits include cables and an adaptor that allow a variety of different hard drives to be connected to a PC via a USB 2.0 / USB 3.0 port.
Ideally, you should be able to plug the notebook hard drive into your desktop host PC and then have access to the volumes stored on that drive. Once the drive is connected, it is time to grab the information off of it with Disk2VHD. You simply launch the application and it searches for accessible volumes on connected hard drives. To convert the physical hard drive into a virtual hard disk, all you need to do is select the appropriate check boxes on Disk2VHD, and then hit the create button. The process can take a while, dependent upon the size of the volume being converted. Once the physical laptop drive is converted into a virtual hard disk, you will have a VHD file that can be used by a virtualization platform.
Step 3 is to load the VHD disk image in Virtualbox VM. Launch VM VirtualBox and choose to create a new Virtual Machine, by launching the new virtual machine wizard, where you can set the default options for the new VM. The most important elements include selecting the correct OS and selecting the newly created VHD to build an accessible virtual machine. Once the wizard completes, you can launch the virtual machine and have access to the applications, data files and most anything else that was contained on the original laptop system.