proxmox - physical to virtual migration

May 24 2025

this guide will describe how to migrate a physical machine to a proxmox virtual machine.

create disk image of the physical machine

1. boot the machine using a linux live cd. I'm using Knoppix 7.2 because it works with the Dual Pentium III machine.
2. find the source disk

lsblk

# assuming the output as follows

# /dev/sda      <-- destination
# /dev/sdb      <-- source

3. mount destination disk (previously formatted as ext3 for knoppix compatibility)

mkdir -p /mnt/destination
mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /mnt/destination

4. create disk image

dd if=/dev/sdb of=/mnt/destination/server.img bs=8M conv=noerror,sync

import image into virtual machine

1. create a new proxmox virtual machine without a disk. note the vmid, i'll use vmid 109 as an example.
2. on the proxmox instance, mount the destination disk.
3. convert disk image to qcow2

qemu-img convert -f raw -O qcow2 server.img server.qcow2

4. import disk into virtual machine

# vm-storage is an example, this would be the storage volume that you store proxmox vm disks.
qm disk import 109 server.qcow2 vm-storage