VHD – Converting Vdisk to Physical

Actually, this was my bad. Windows 7 does allow you to change the drive letter of the physical drive hosting the VHD. It's even smart enough to recognize that's what it's doing and put up a warning message to that effect.

What was preventing me from changing the drive letter was that Windows had placed the page file on that drive and you can't change the drive letter of a drive with the page file on it. It's interesting that Windows won't put the pagefile.sys file on a VHD drive but will find a physical drive to put it on instead.

Your VM has the wrong Boot Device drivers (and possibly HAL), on Win5.1 this will come up as a STOP 7B.

Injecting the correct drivers is a bit of a hassle after the fact. MS has an article on fixing this in XP (it's basically the exact same thing in 2K).

It boils down to:

• Mount the VHD on a Win7 or similar machine.
• Load the registry hives, merge the driver information, unload.
• Inject the driver files (there's only a few, like 5 files).
• Unmount the VHD

Note - Doing a P2V on a Win2K server is going to be pretty rough. That's an 11 year old OS. You're way past time to ditch it and upgrade to something newer.