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P2V on Apple Silicon - Converting a ...
P2V on Apple Silicon - Converting a Physical Apple Silicon MacBook to a Virtual Machine on another Apple Silicon device (M1, M2, M3) on Apple's Virtualization Framework 1# P2V on Apple Silicon - Converting a Physical Apple Silicon MacBook to a Virtual Machine on another Apple Silicon device (M1, M2, M3) on Apple's Virtualization Framework
23Outline: Having recently bought a MacBook Pro (M3 Max) to replace my MacBook Air (M2), I decided it would be a good idea to start fresh and reinstall everything on my new Mac. However, I always like to keep a backup of my old data, so I thought it would be a good idea to virtualize my old machine on my new machine. Having much previous experience working with Windows P2V's (Physical to Virtual), I figured it would be as simple as Clone, Copy, Restore, and Boot. However, with the advent of Apple's new Signed System Volume, as well as the differences in file systems, APFS containers, and all, this ended up being a project that took about 2 days of nonstop researching, debugging, when I expected it to be a project which would last as long as it would take to clone my drive. I was very wrong. However, with all of my newfound knowledge in this subject, I finally found a way to make it work.
45Starting off, virtualization was already rough. I had recently purchased Parallels, and running Windows was pretty difficult - I used many different Windows 11 images, from the one Parallels downloads itself, to tiny11 for arm, and many others. However, they would all end up extremely unstable and unusable, most of them having no UWP support - it would start off fine, but there would be a popup saying "App is not working. App needs an update" (App being Microsoft Store, by the way), and then failing afterwards. I ended up solving that by joining Windows Insider, downloading a vmdk, converting it in Parallels, and then running my own updates and etc. Also, I transferred over a Windows 11 license to an installation I thought was working, but ended up not, so I lost a windows license too. But, tangents over.
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