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Since in my last post I talked about using “manual P2V”, I’ll provide some details on what I actually did.
The hard drive in my old laptop had been failing over several days randomly causing the OS to crash. One day I heard the drive sound like a pinball machine, then system locked up and blue screened. On reboot it said Primary Hard Drive Not Found, ouch. I shut it down for a while then started it back up and the OS booted. I immediately ran a full backup of the system (I had only data backups from the night before). It was running, but I had an idea. What if I could migrate my full backup into a VM. Well, after learning a few things I successfully performed a manual P2V for my laptop. This was a good exercise with valuable experience.

Basic steps:

• Create a new VM with appropriate resources
• Install base WinXP from CD (if you have a working XP VM template you can start there)
• Perform a full restore on top of the working WinXP OS (NTBackup worked fine)
• Modify the registry to support the new boot device type (this step is a bit more painful if not done first here, this is also where all of the time was spent in working though this exercise)
• Reboot
• Install VMware Tools
• Reboot
• Done

This same procedure could be used for moving a HD between systems with different disk controllers. Essentially this is what I did, only the destination in my case was virtual.

Since I was coming from a backup and not a working OS, I didn’t have the new boot device drivers installed. When I booted the new VM for the first time I was getting blue screens stating that my boot device was not available (0×7B). I used a Bart’s boot disk to get onto the hard drive of the system and inject the required driver as well as modify the registry to register the new driver. Once I booted the VM again it came right up. I uninstalled a bunch of software that was related specifically to the old laptop as well as VMware Workstation. I could not install VMware Tools until Workstation was removed.

The VM has been working great ever since, and I’m using it right now as I type this.