I have a mates laptop that dies but the HDD was good and was getting sent back for warranty repair. Being the good mate ive done a HDD RAW copy of it. Now the laptop is not repairable they have sent him a new one without his HDD and it has different hardware specs to the old one so there is no use restoring the image to the new HDD. He failed to tell me that he had software on the drive that have license keys he needs to transfer over. The easiest way would be to boot the img up in a VM and copy the keys and any other files he needs.
Is there any way of taking a imgc and converting it for use as a VM or is it going to be better to get an old HDD and restoring it?

Hi,

The imgc is a compressed imaged. The only way I can think of is to write the image back to a hdd & then use free software like disk2vhd to convert it. Then if your lucky you can boot the virtual machine in software like VMware, hyper-v,virtual PC etc.


Loki

create a clone hdd out of the imgc and put the clone into the new laptop.

If youre very lucky, it will start - and only request new drivers. Ignore
that and just try to get the license keys off.

If they are available in emails of that image - you should be able to
copy the emails and import them into a new system, otherwise use
one of the freeware tools to read the license codes out of this system

If that works you can - as second step - install the missing drivers -
I use usually "slimdrivers" (freeware) and afterwards for still missing
drivers (the not detected ones) "drivereasy" (slow as freeware).

If there is no internet access to that system due to missing network
driver - use a 2nd system for download from laptop manufacturers
website - or install an ethernet to USB adapter ($ 10 - 20) and go on
as explained above (slimdrivers/drivereasy) directly on that system.

If the new clone doesnt work - go on as LOKI explained.

+++

Also if the image written back doesn't boot you could use software like Product Key Finder & point it to the windows folder & it will list product keys

http://recover-keys.com

Recover activation keys from 6521 installed software programs at £16.95

http://recover-keys.com/en/supported.html



Loki

Thanks for the replies I got lucky as the company he sent the dead laptop to returned his old HDD with the new laptop.(first time ive heard of this happening) So there is no need to worry.