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 Create Virtual Machine from Physical disk to boot from VM

John Meshwinster's profile image
John Meshwinster posted Oct 31, 2024 11:22 AM

Hi community,

my name is John and im posting first time here so bear with me in case im not following exactly standard procedures.

Situation:
We do have an older workstation computer with important data on it that i need to boot to access software data. Recently the PSU died and even though i tried to replace the PSU the system is no longer booting.

Some hardware specs i was able to find:
1. Main drive is a Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 9 160GB ATA/133 (configured jumper DS MASTER) --> https://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/maxtor/en_us/documentation/data_sheets/diamondmax_plus_9_data_sheet.pdf
1.1. The hdd has 4 partitions to it where E:) seems to be the windows partition and rest is random stuff like software, work and private

2. Mainboard is a MSI AGP 8x, MS-6741 version 1: --> https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/msi-ms-6741

3. Second drive is a Seagate Medalist 3221 3.2GB ATA
3.1. I believe we can ignore this as this seems to be only a small data backup drive

4. System is running Windows XP

Question:
How can i create a functional backup that allows me to boot the computer in VMWare? Please see what i have tried as well.

What have i tried already:
Created a Windows VM, booted the VM, connected & mounted the Main drive to it, mounted it and used vCenter Converter Standalone to create a vmdk. This vmdk i tried to use within a new Windows XP VM as hard drive as IDE (and SCSI). When booting i can see the Windows XP logo for about 2 seconds before i get famous blue screen with a 0x0000007B and system is rebooting.

I read a lot on the net about what that blue screen is about and some where leaning towards a missing driver (ATA or IDE). But here my skills left me behind as some articles were going into windows registry entries and edit them which i have to admit is beyond my skills.

Happy to hear some advises and ideas i could try here to achieve what i want to achieve: a bootable VM of that old system.

RaSystemlord's profile image
RaSystemlord

John, not sure what is the best approach and what is possible for you, but have different choices:

A. Vmware has a tool which allows to create a VM from a physical computer. You may need to search for it during these Broadcom-times.

You do that on a different computer, preferably with SSD disks for decent performance. You do NOT use the old disks for the new computer. The Tool lets you decide what you take with it. Pay attention to your selections. You can of course try it out multiple times. The end result is a VM working in the new environment.

However, don't know if this works or not - is XP supported and all that.

B. If you only need the data - you write "software data" don't know what it means - you can always have those disks on another system and read the data. You don't need the computer to boot up. The other system can be a physical computer or probably it is more handy if it's VM-computer.

In this scenario, you use the data wherever and whatever operating system you wish. However, you don't get any software automatically transferred to you. If you have the software media and installation keys, you can always install them again. If you have software that requires XP, creating a new XP computer isn't trivial, because of its patching and SP issues, but you can probably run them in Win7. Win10 and later, might not work for XP era software (not all of them anyway).

You can always read the disks somewhere else, unless they are encrypted. If Windows turns out to be difficult for that purpose, use Linux - it doesn't care what kind of file permissions you might have given in Windows.

I hope either way works for you.