Problem booting virtual machine after converting VMDK to VHD

Question

I used the VMWare VCenter Converter Standalone Client to convert a physical drive on my old PC to a virtual drive. The conversion worked fine and I ended up with a valid VMDK file. Next, I wanted to convert the VMDK to a VHD for use with Microsoft Virtual PC, since that's what I use on my new box. I used WinImage for the conversion and that worked fine, too. I can access the files from the virtual drive through WinImage.

However, when I create a new virtual machine using Virtual PC and add the existing VHD file, the machine doesn't boot. The initial boot screen flashes with the amount of RAM and then the screen goes black. If I turn off the VM and reboot in safe mode I can see the drivers being loaded until eventually it gets to crcdisk.sys and hangs indefinitely.

Any ideas how to fix this? I'm not opposed to starting over from scratch if there's another method to turn my physical machine into a Virtual PC VM.

Thanks!

EDIT - I should add that the virtual drive is a system boot drive and not a secondary drive.

EDIT - I tried booting from the install CD and doing a repair. The result was that the system could not be repaired due to a "driver error."

Solution 1

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314082

This should solve your problem. Basically, even if your windows supports IDE drives, if it was installed on anything else, the IDE drivers aren't used. In order to set them up, you need to follow the article

Solution 2

If your old PC uses an EIDE (possibly also SATA) disk you can probably just snapshot it and restore the snapshot to a blank VM disk and the VM should boot. See www.drivesnapshot.de for my favourite (free evaluation!) snapshot tool.

JR

Solution 3

Make sure to use the latest version of the VMware converter tool, I believe that the current version is v4.03. I've always found that newer versions converted better. Stands to reason, I guess...

Comments

[Rob Sobers]

It checked the disk type under VMWare - it is an IDE hard disk.

[Ian Murphy]

'fraid I don't have any other suggestions. I still think its driver related but the only option there is run through the os repair options from the boot CD.

[Paul Fenney]

This worked for me when converting a VM from qcow2 to VirtualBox VDI.