Nonbooting Win7 VM - Restored via AOMEI

[raywood]

I’m working in VMware Workstation 17.6.2. In a Win7 VM, I have set up two virtual CD-ROM drives. One contains Strelec’s Win10PE ISO; the ISO in the other contains an AOMEI Backupper ADI image of a preferred Win7 installation. I used AOMEI in Strelec’s ISO to restore that preferred ADI to the VM’s virtual HDD, overwriting the basic Win7 installation that previously occupied that HDD.

Then I tried to boot the VM’s HDD. That failed. The copy of Windows File Explorer in Strelec confirms that the basic folders are there – C:\Windows and so forth.

The attached report from Boot Repair Disk (booted as an ISO in the VM) says, “No boot loader is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda.” I wonder whether this is a consequence of a repair I made along the way. The overwritten Win7 installation was MBR. The newly installed Win7 installation is GPT. AOMEI’s conversion of one to the other never seems to work. So before running the AOMEI restore process, I used Strelec’s copy of MiniTool Partition Wizard to convert the target HDD to GPT.

My question: how can I get the VM to boot?

 

[raywood]

Further exploration suggests that at least part of the solution may be to experiment with drive types (e.g., change from SCSI to IDE) and to try restoring to both UEFI and BIOS firmwares (selected in Workstation > Settings > Options tab > Advanced). See e.g., Manjaro.org and Anandtech.

 

[torchwood]

i dont think it will work, .
I recently installed Mint 22 onto my old Acer,>> was << going to dual boot it with W7 pro
The Acer has an old MBR set-up, i could quite merrily run Mint during the install set-up session
However after rebooting, the comps Bios could see both disks but could not boot into Mint OS
Had a look at Disk managment sure enough my 7 disk was MBR, Mint disk was converted to GPT.....uuuuurgh
(i made sure it was MBR before 2nd try)
tried the boot repair option within Mint no joy

note
Diskpart command Convert to MBR.... invokes the Clean option so it to wipes any data on it