Laptop P2V Nightmare

[mronsman]

I have tried every way I can think of to convert my old XP laptop to a VM running under VMware Workstation 6 RC on my new Vista laptop. I backed up my old laptop using Ghost and restored it successfully to a new VM. This was after trying to get the VMware Converter boot CD to work which didn't like the drives I was mapping for a temp location. It was also after trying to do a hot migration with Converter and getting repeated vmsnap permission errors. I did use Converter to run the Configure Machine job and that did complete successfully. But unfortunately I am getting the 7B STOP BSOD. I ran the Configure job multiple times to no avail.

I next took the step of using the old P2V Assistant to convert the VM. It seemed to run fine but still BSOD.

Used the Bart PE FIXVMSCSI plug in and still BSOD. Tried using both Buslogic and LSI. No luck. Attempted to set the scsi0.present value in the VMX to FALSE. Still BSOD. What a pain!!! I have done many P2V conversions in the past with no problems.

Please let me know if anyone has any ideas of further things to try.

Thanx,

Matt Ronsman

[MR-T]

The best way I found to P2V my laptop was using the Ultimate P2V boot CD & Ghost to get the image off the laptop and onto a network share.

I then created a helper vm, ghosted the image back to a virtual disk and finally moved the disk to a new vm.

The best thing about the ultimate p2v boot CD is you can add the drivers required by your laptop.

[mattpound]

I used VMware Converter to mine and it worked fine. I did have to run VMware Converter inside WindowsXP on the laptop and dump it off to mapped drive.

[mronsman]

I ended up doing a Repair XP reinstallation over the top of the VM to get it working. I had to switch from the OEM license to a Volume. Works swell now!