Disk2VHD is amazing and is definitely the way to go. It's pretty straight forward to use. Having an external drive or network drive to dump the image onto is definitely the best way to go in my experience.
When you set the VM up, you just need to make sure that the storage devices mimic what the laptop had. Check the BIOS of the laptop and see what the SATA mode is, IDE or AHCI. Use that when you're setting up the VM.
Having said that, Windows is usually tied to the hardware that it's on and if you move it, it's extremely likely that the installation will have to be activated again.
You could buy a microSD card and put whatever distro you desire on it and see if you could borrow a friend's RPi. That way you can test everything and if it works you can keep your SD card that you've configured and go and buy your own.
erroneous got a reaction from Mikensan in Port disk image into a VM?
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