Converting a Windows 2000 Physical Machine to a Virtual Machine

Question

What's the best way to create a virtual machine from an old Windows 2000 machine?
I found VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 4.0.1 which is the last version to support Windows 2000.
Are there any recommended alternatives? Are there any pitfalls I should expect? I'd like to run the VM on a Windows XP machine.

Solution 1

I've done this once, long time ago. The biggest pain was installing the correct drivers for the (virtual) hard disk. You must do it while this Windows installation still can boot on hardware.

If your hardware uses AHCI, and your virtual machine uses ATA, you're in trouble, you need to convert your Windows to ATA mode before you move to virtual. Google is full of recipes for this, but I cannot recommend any, since none worked for me.

So my advise is, make a copy of the disk, make sure you keep your original machine intact in case you need to reconfigure it again, install all needed drivers and try to boot in VMWare. Your success is very much dependent on your current hardware configuration.

Solution 2

Just did this. Installed VMware vCenter Converter Standalone (v 4.0.1) on the local Windows 2000 server which has SP4 and SP4 rollup installed. Had to reboot the server. Started converter and used the local admin creds. Remember to point the destination at a host, I made the mistake of pointing it at the vCenter server.

Comments

[Admin]

if you are going to use VMware then you must update your win2k machine to SP4 before using the vCenter Converter. It is straight forward converter. there is dis2vhd for Microsoft Virtual Software, but It VMware is much easy to use:msmvps.com/blogs/jeffloucks/archive/2009/10/08/…

[Admin]

Thanks. I'll check re: SP4. Unfortunately, dis2vhd doesn't work with Win2K.

[Admin]

Try this tool after creating a dd image -- liveview.sf.net