Problem booting virtual machine after converting VMDK to VHD

virtual-machinesvirtualizationvmware-vcenter

I used the VMWare VCenter Converter Standalone Client to convert a physical drive on my old PC to a virtual drive. The conversion worked fine and I ended up with a valid VMDK file. Next, I wanted to convert the VMDK to a VHD for use with Microsoft Virtual PC, since that's what I use on my new box. I used WinImage for the conversion and that worked fine, too. I can access the files from the virtual drive through WinImage.

However, when I create a new virtual machine using Virtual PC and add the existing VHD file, the machine doesn't boot. The initial boot screen flashes with the amount of RAM and then the screen goes black. If I turn off the VM and reboot in safe mode I can see the drivers being loaded until eventually it gets to crcdisk.sys and hangs indefinitely.

Any ideas how to fix this? I'm not opposed to starting over from scratch if there's another method to turn my physical machine into a Virtual PC VM.

Thanks!

EDIT – I should add that the virtual drive is a system boot drive and not a secondary drive.

EDIT – I tried booting from the install CD and doing a repair. The result was that the system could not be repaired due to a "driver error."

Best Answer

If your old PC uses an EIDE (possibly also SATA) disk you can probably just snapshot it and restore the snapshot to a blank VM disk and the VM should boot. See www.drivesnapshot.de for my favourite (free evaluation!) snapshot tool.

JR