Virtual Boot problems

The motherboard on my pc went the other day. So today I took out the hard drive and loaded it in a docking station on a laptop and used disk2vhd to created a virtual.

Everything went fine. I then downloaded Oracle Virtual Box and created the virtual and attached the vhd to it.

Booted it up and boot manager came up with the BSOD.

I put in my Windows 7 DVD and did a repair on it but it could not resolve the issue.

First question is: Am I wasting my time ?
Second Question: If the first answer is no then what am I missing.

Thanks

Shawn

Kari,

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately it didn't work on Virtual PC either.

I ended up doing this.

windows - How to convert laptop drive for use as VMware image? - Super User


We have just performed this operation on two PCs, a dead desktop and a dead laptop.

It was a long haul though, and most of the suggestion over at How to convert laptop drive (with a dead laptop) for use as VMware image? were of limited use.

What didn't work

We tried creating a new VM with both raw disk access and it's own virtual disk, cloning one to the other (using clonezilla) and then running the VMware convert utility on it, but that resulted in VMs which blue screened on boot, so that wasn't a solution.

Note: Using Ultimate P2V (as suggested in harrymc's answer) should get rid of the bluescreen, but I haven't tried this and Mike Laverick requires you to register to read the full article. Similarly How Convert Physical to Virtual contains details of how to manually change the VMs HAL, but that really is a complex option.
We tried the create a new VM, attach the raw hard drive to the VM and convert method, but that just gave a cryptic error message with the current vmware-vdiskmanager program.

We tried looking at the solutions on ServerFault for Convert a hard-drive into a VMware machine but most of those solutions had too little detail to get us past the problems we had with those suggested solutions.

What worked

The solution that we settled on was suggested by Dave M in that his answer though.

We downloaded and installed the trialware version of Symantec System Recovery Server Edition (which is currently Symantec™ System Recovery 2011 Server Edition FREE 60-day Evaluation!).

We then created a one-off backup of each target hard drive (one for the desktop PC hard drive we had, one for the laptop hard drive), creating two recovery points. Then we performed a one-off conversion each to a virtual machine.

We selected the option to Run Windows Mini-Setup and Split virtual disk into 2 GB (.vmdk) files. The former substantially reduces the time to get the resulting VM up and running, while the second allows you to transport VMs around on memory sticks that don't support >2GB files/

We then booted each VM in VMware Player, the Windows mini setup ran through quickly, installing the new virtual drivers & replacing the old real drivers.

Finally we installed VMware tools on each VM and let the VMs pick up the new VMware tools optimised drivers.

The only downside with this method is that it does require re-activation of windows, so make sure you have noted down the product key of the dead machine before you sta