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Create VMware virtual compatible image from old Vista boot disk. Help please.

  • Create VMware virtual compatible image from old Vista boot disk. Help please. A person in our office had their computer die on them. Looks like the mother board is fried. This was a Vista Machine. I just installed a new Windows 7 box, but I'd like to install VMware Player on it and create an image from the old Vista boot drive that they can access if needed. My problem seems to be that all of the tools for creating an image for VMware Player to use involve a working machine first. Well I don't have that. What I have done is taken the old Vista boot drive out of the bad box and installed it into an external enclosure. Now what I have to do is make a VMware compatible boot image from that drive and place it on the new Windows 7 box. How can I do this?

  • Answer:

    It's not easy. I've never managed to do a Windows p2v without access to the original system. The trouble is that Windows is picky about disk and video drivers. If you boot a Windows installation on a box that has a different disk controller chipset to the one it was installed for, it will refuse to start. There's a generic disk controller driver built into Windows that works on every disk controller, but you have to tell Windows to use that before you migrate the installation; it's not smart enough to fall back to the generic driver if the chipset-specific one fails. Your best bet, if you're absolutely determined to forge ahead with this, would be to find a second machine of the same make and model as the first, temporarily swap your recovered hard disk into that, boot Vista up on it and do the p2v preparation steps there. But seriously: Vista is a dog. It's Windows ME 2008, and if you have access to a Windows 7 box there is no reason on God's green Earth to continue to put up with Vista, let alone the crippled excuse for a tortoise that Vista will become when running virtual. Are you sure you can't simply install the vital apps that were on the Vista box into the Windows 7 box, and migrate the user's files?

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http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/ can read various types of third-party image files, Acronis being one of them. Acronis can take an image of a hard drive, so that's one path. There are probably others.

odinsdream

There's a generic disk controller driver built into Windows that works on every disk controller, but you have to tell Windows to use that before you migrate the installation; it's not smart enough to fall back to the generic driver if the chipset-specific one fails. This is true. I recall a nightmare scenario where I had to migrate a physical server into a virtual environment and had this problem. I ended up attaching a virtual floppy disk (!!) to the virtual machine, booting from that, and then booting the virtual hard disk from the floppy.

odinsdream

What the what? Why are you trying to do this this way? Is it like flabdablet says and you're trying to physically run apps off the old drive instead of just accessing the files? Flab's right, find someone else in the office with the same system, swap hdd's, and go about it normally.

TomMelee

Use http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415 to create a VHD of the current disk, then throw it through VMware Converter.

deezil

Keep in mind that if the copy of Vista was OEM, the licensing on it was tied to the now-dead motherboard, so you would need a new copy to do this legally.

reptile

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