re: Tips for migrating a physical computer to a virtual machine (part 2)

david.taylor@melbourneit.com.au — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 05:28:00 GMT

Ouch...I am having no luck with your tips to date.

I did get the machine booting for the first few seconds, then got an error reading:
windows\system32\config\system

After about 20 reboots trying different things, it got that problem (seemed to be magic). Then I got booted up, but could not login because the mouse and keyboard were not working. I tried safe mode, but it still wouldn't let me work with the mouse or the keyboard (strange hey!).

I did play around with the Recovery Console, but didn't get very far.

Then I wanted to get Windows to attempt a recovery install; however that took a few hours because all the versions on XP Pro I tried only allowed me to delete and do a fresh install; finally I tried an XP Pro with SP1 ISO image, and it *did* allow me to do a recovery install. (The machine did have SP1 installed so this makes sense, however the only CD my wife had when she got the PC was the original release version of XP...so lucky for my MSDN Universal Subscription...).

So...No it gets half way through the recovery install, and the Windows Installer gives me an "Unspecified Error".....

Ouch. So now I cannot boot the VM image at all (it just reverts to Windows Setup because it got half way through), and I cannot finish the setup because it just errors out half way through.

Glad it was just a VM!

Thanks for your help Ben - but this is absolutely *NOT* easy...and not something beginners should try.

BTW Does the VSMT to any tricks? I wanted to try it...but you seem to need a whole lot of infrastructure installed just to run it. Pitty the VSMT toolkit team didn't just design a solution that could take a drive image and work from that :-(

re: Tips for migrating a physical computer to a virtual machine (part 2)

Virtual PC Guy — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 19:57:00 GMT

Hi David,

If the hardware you are moving between is quite different - Windows may need time to redetect your motherboard. I have seen situations where a migrated system booted without mouse or keyboard - but if you let it sit at the login prompt for 5 to 10 minutes - Windows would detect the new mouse and keyboard and you could start using them.

Cheers,
Ben