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VMware P2V Windows 2000

Alastair Grant | Wednesday 8 October 2008

I've been trying to convert my physical Windows 2000 work PC to a VMware image on my new machine with little success.

The convertor was flaky and failed a lot of the time, and I'm afraid I don't have any real tips on how to fix it. It seemed lots of reinstalling of the converter software, rebooting and various different destinations finally managed to get me a 97% complete image of my source machine.

I finally got this up and running, and danced around blue-screens while I attempted to get the IDE controller set to something generic.

After much tinkering I got the system stable enough to logon. To discover no CD-ROM drive. Ahhh, no way of installing VM Tools (cheated and used a USB stick - didn't help). Added and played around with CD-ROM settings for the VM - no luck. There was no CD-ROM drive appearing in explorer/My Computer. The Device Manager reported the device, but with a yellow exclamation mark: "
This device is not working properly because Windows cannot load the drivers required for this device. (Code 31)"

Joy. Finally after much hunting around the Internet I came across a MS KB article on how to fix this. Worked a charm.

I just now need to figure out why the VM won't shutdown gracefully!

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