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RichHeeren
Contributor
Contributor

Can I recover a dead PC as a Virtual Machine?

I had a PC (Dell Precision Workstation 7500) that completely died and it had a 3 Drive RAID array for the operating system drive running windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit. Now all I am left with is a Windows 7 64 bit System Repair Disk (on a DVD data disk) and a Windows 7 image backup of the dead PC on an external hard drive.

Is there a way to recover the dead PC as a virtual machine on Workstation Pro 15? If so, can someone detail the steps to take to do this? Thanks so much for any help!!!

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sjesse
Leadership
Leadership

You only option is to remove the hard drive, place it in a exernal usb drive, and connect it to the computer with workstation. If you get this far copy what you need to a local folder, and then you could try using the "use a physical disk" option when creating a vm.If it boots you "could" have direct access to the machine, but this can be hit or miss depending on what was installed and what was wrong.

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RichHeeren
Contributor
Contributor

I do not have the dead PC hard drive! (it was a 3 drive RAID configuration) All I have is a Windows 7 image backup of the dead PC drive on an external hard drive!

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sjesse
Leadership
Leadership

Have you tried running the dvd disk restore in a new blank vm, you'll need enough space to hold the size of what the hdd was

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RichHeeren
Contributor
Contributor

I will try that. I will try to create a new blank Windows 7 virtual machine in Workstation Pro 15. Then I will try to boot the new blank virtual machine with the win 7 repair dvd disk that I have from the dead PC and see if it lets me recover the dead PC's drive to the new blank virtual machine using the image backup file that I have of the dead PC. This will take me a little bit of time to try. Thanks for the suggestion!

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RichHeeren
Contributor
Contributor

I created a blank Windows 7 virtual machine and then booted/started it from the Windows Repair Disk DVD and then selected the option to restore from a system image backup but it can not find my system image backup as it does not see the image backup located on an external USB hard drive. Apparently external USB hard drives are not recognized as being on "this computer" of the blank Windows 7 virtual machine. Any other suggestions? Thanks!

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continuum
Immortal
Immortal

Add another virtual disk to the new VM and use the Win7 LiveCD to format it and copy the backup to the new VMDK.


________________________________________________
Do you need support with a VMFS recovery problem ? - send a message via skype "sanbarrow"
I do not support Workstation 16 at this time ...

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RichHeeren
Contributor
Contributor

What is a Win7 LiveCD?

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RichHeeren
Contributor
Contributor

Before I continue spending a lot of time trying to recover the dead PC as a virtual machine, will I even be able to activate Windows on the virtual machine since the dead PC was running a pre-installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit by Dell on the dead PC which was a Precision Workstation 7500???

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continuum
Immortal
Immortal

No, using P2V with an  OEM Windows makes no sense.


________________________________________________
Do you need support with a VMFS recovery problem ? - send a message via skype "sanbarrow"
I do not support Workstation 16 at this time ...

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