Hi,
1) Yes.
VMware Workstation licensing is based on the honor system, aka there are no activation servers and having two licenses active for a little while is OK.
You can also just use the 30 day trial time in order to move over to your new laptop.
2) You might be able to import those vhd files, but I'm not sure it works.
What most people do is to use the VMware Converter product in order to export their physical machine to a VM.
Please note that if your laptop has synaptic drivers that your keyboard in the VM most likely will not work until you uninstall the drivers and software associated with Synaptic (easiest is to uninstall the software before the migration)
Any additional tip would be to shut down, not suspend, your VMs on the old host before migrating to new hardware.
You might also want to commit any snapshots taken when the VM was running.
The reason for that is that with new hardware comes new CPU's and GPUs and they are slightly different and might cause trouble if the VM was not shut down.
Finally I do consider it important to have backups of your VMs on external media before doing all this (disclaimer see my footnote, but I would have said so anyways).
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Wil
Hi,
Re. Synaptic. In Windows 7 control panel, check "Add / Remove Programs" and make sure there's no software in there mentioning Synaptic.
It's not about you using it, but all about the drivers of that software interfering with VMware keyboard drivers.
As for "can you clone a running OS".. yes. that's exactly what you can do with VMware Converter.
VMware vCenter Converter Standalone
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Wil
Hi,
If possible use the latest version.
Since you have been able to start the service manually, I would expect it to now work OK.
--
Wil
Hi,
This is mostly a process of doing I'm afraid and yes some of it is time consuming depending on the size of your host.
As for VMware Workstation, you can uninstall it afterwards. It works in a VM (it's one of my favorite use cases as it simplifies testing scenarios that involve having a dependency on VMware Workstation)
It has been a while since I last ran it, but you can resize the virtual disks during the migration.
I would certainly use an external disk or NAS for creating the VM.
It might also be a good idea to move some of the larger files off that you do not need in your VM.
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Wil
Hi,
I hope that the conversion only deals with the system drive or that one can choose which other drives should be included?
You can choose.
Re. .7zip.. not sure how battle tested it is for copying files into the .vmdk, but you can copy files out.
In that case I would personally stick with the supported scenario and that is to mount a vmdk as a disk.
Something that is just part of VMware Workstation's feature set.
--
Wil
Hi,
You can resize your target disk size during the converter process.
If you didn't do that, then not to worry as you can shrink your VM afterwards (but not resize the disk). For windows guests however shrinking usually is fine.
re. not able to run. Yes, use "run as administrator" would have been my first suggestion.
As far as "not able to access NAS" well when you run as administrator you run as another user (administrator).
You can access the NAS if you created a user named administrator.
The external disk most likely will be faster to use though.
--
Wil
The external disk I used as target is a 2TB SSD so yes, it is fast.... Took 1h30m to convert.
My old laptop has two physical drives, one 500 GB SSD system drive and one 2TB 2.5" regular hdd used as data drive.
I virtualized the laptop with the exclusion of the data drive (because it holds too much unneeded data, like 1 TB too much) and later when it was done I added a 600 GB virtual disk to it using the VM settings.
When I started up the virtual machine it crashed with a bluescreen (actually black)...
Then I tried the WS15 option to upgrade the vm to a later VMWare version (the converter created a WS 12 type machine), I selected the version 15.x.
I also let it clone the vm since I had spare space on the SSD drive I used.
This time it actually managed to start up and run and I could install the updated VMWare Tools and format the extra drive as my 😧 data drive.
So far so good...
But now I ran into problems when trying to transfer the data to the 😧 drive in the guest...
In earlier usage of Workstation guests I have been able to drag and drop files and folders from Windows Explorer on the host into an Explorer window on the guest and the data was copied. I tried to pull a folder from my data disk on the new laptop over onto the explorer in the vm but it turned out to be a no-go!
What happened was that the vm window froze for quite some time and when it was done there was no data still in the guest but the folder I dragged disappeared from my host!
So how can I load the virtual data drive on the guest with files and folders from my data drive on the new laptop (which is a copy of the original data drive)?
It seems like the drag-drop function is very limited in what it can do. I need to transfer something like 300 GB of data.
The guest is running with a NAT-ed network adapter because I don't want it to appear on the main network as there will then be two copies of the same computer. But with NAT one cannot reach the guest from the host and vice versa, right?
I tried to add a second network adapter set to "Host only" and I also shared my data drive on the host so I could reach it from the guest.
But it seems like I cannot set the network type on this adapter to Home or Work, which is needed in order for network sharing to work. 
Surely there should be a way to move data into a virtual machine from its host without having to copy via a NAS server?
(I can see my NAS server from the new guest.)
I managed to solve the problem by having the guest attach to a share on the host instead of the other way around...
So now I am copying files from the shared drive on my new laptop to the data drive inside the new virtualized copy of my old laptop.
Working but slow.
The transfer runs at 1.6 Mbyte/s, which means it will take very long to transfer the 250 GB of data....
Like 2 full days.
Hi,
Yep for copying a lot of data (and especially many many files) this is one of the better ways to do it.
Re. drag and drop.
That mechanism depends on VMware Tools, but it will first copy the data to your %temp% folder before it will copy the data to the final destination.
Most of the times that means that it will copy the data to a folder (like c:\Windows\Temp ) on C:\ before it copies it to 😧
If you run out of free data space on C before the copy completes then I'm not sure what happens, but it might be what you just described.
Of course it should never have deleted any files from your host before it completes the data copy to your final destination.
While I do use the data copy/share features offered via vmware tools quite often myself, they are not always the best choice.
It is lacking in both performance as well as reliability once you need to copy a lot (and/or very large) files.
Provided that there is sufficient disk space on your temp folder, I'd say that it is fine up to about 10GB and hundreds of files.
Once you go over any of those limits it starts to be problematic.
--
Wil
Re. .7zip.. not sure how battle tested it is for copying files into the .vmdk, but you can copy files out.
In that case I would personally stick with the supported scenario and that is to mount a vmdk as a disk.
Something that is just part of VMware Workstation's feature set.
This is from your 5th or so reply to this thread.
You are actually telling me right there (underlined) what I should do and what turned out to be what I did in the end after reading the PRO15 user guide.
I.e. Shut down the guest, then use the function in the settings dialogue for the vm to mount the virtual disk to the host system.
I did so and managed to fill the disk with all of my data (about 100 GB) in about 5 hours or so.
I then unmounted the virtual disk and started the vm.
Turns out that Windows sensed something fishy had been going on with the disk so on boot it scanned the drive with chkdsk and checked all of it.
When it was done (no errors 
) it started the vm normally and I had all of my data where it should be.
Only problem is that the desktop shortcuts I had on my old laptop and which pointed to the executables on my data drive are now showing no image at all....
So I guess I have to recreate them all since just opening the properties of them and selecting the correct icon does not work for some reason.
Hi,
Only problem is that the desktop shortcuts I had on my old laptop and which pointed to the executables on my data drive are now showing no image at all....
So I guess I have to recreate them all since just opening the properties of them and selecting the correct icon does not work for some reason.
Windows tries to be smart and correct the broken shortcuts. If there's nothing to correct it might end up confused.
As for not getting correct icons. That's an icon cache problem and has been a long standing issue on windows.
Just bumped into it myself the other day where I update contents of .ico files and not getting the new icon refreshed in the preview thumbnail.
I _think_ the solution is to search for the corresponding thumb.db file and delete that so that Windows can recreate it, but not sure as I did not chase that one myself, just shrugged.
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Wil