"soft transition" to qubes os (puting old system in a qube)

User Support General
1

Hello,
Since some times already, i would like to migrate to Qubes. Sadly first, it’s complicated for me to find time where i can diconnect my production system (presently debian), and then, it’ll be a bulk of work to first transfer everything and then work again.
so I would like to plug my present drive on an ssd, and having my present system runnig in a cube, to then split the different data, activities, bookmarks … between the different qubes.
I guess a such solution might be of interest for many newbies.
In my case i hope that coming from debian should make things easy ?
thanks already,

2

You can try to create new StandaloneVM qube in HVM mode and change the size of its system storage to be the same as your old SSD. Then you can dd from your old SSD to this qube’s system image.
If your debian installed in UEFI mode then you’ll need to enable the UEFI boot for this qube:

Not sure if it’ll work but you can try.

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3

Is it necessary to copy the old system ? It is a 480Gb SSD, split in multiple partitions, and my Qubes Os SSD is 960, so giving half of it to “legacy” seems huge. Isn’t it possible to directly plug the SSD ? (it’s a clone, i have a backup)

4

Last time I’ve tried it I couldn’t boot the system installed in UEFI mode from the disk attached to the VM as described in the linked github issue:

It works for HVM without PCI devices attached to it.
But if I attach any PCI device to HVM with UEFI enabled then it’ll be stuck at Guest has not initialized the display (yet) again.

And the same goes for when you try to attach the disk as block device instead of PCI device.