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WFinch
Contributor
Contributor

Making a Virtual Machine

Sorry i posted this in General before I noticed the converter forum. Here goes.

New Vm user here and I am simply blown away by everything that VMware has to offer. I have an old windows NT server box that has an old photo database program in it that I would love to turn into a VM and use anywhere I need to, (This old program stored the photos in it's own database files so extraction would take a professional company). I tired to use converter on the machine tonight told it to do the local machine, picked both the partitions of the harddrive as the source, and the destination as an extra HDD that I had put into the box for the VM. The total amount was about 10-11gigs though the source HDD is 80 gigs. Told it to do the Min size of the partitions, then VMware standalone virtual machine, named it and choose the extra HDD as the location asked if I wanted to clone the machine onto itself and I picked "Yes". Now it asked about the use of the disks, I picked, "Allow virtual disk files to grow" which is where I may have messed up as I had several other things stored on that drive. It went through the process fine till about 97% and then it failed and wiped out the file structure on the extra HDD. Is it possible to convert this NT box into a virtual machine that I could move around and run where ever I need to run it? What did I do wrong? Little help here would be greatly appreciated. This computer runs windows on C: and stores all the database info on D:.

Browsing the converter forms I see mention of running converter twice, running it first for C: and then running it a second time for just 😧 Is this the solution I am looking for to this problem? When an earlier post mentions "opening the virtual machine and adding in the virtual disk for 😧 on the machine" Is it referring to running the VM of C: on player, or is there another tool I need to get for this task.

Any and all guidance is appreciated greatly.

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rriva
Expert
Expert

you could try the following :

1) Cold clone the phisical machine with converter or with another product like Ghost or TrueImage for example ...

2) Convert only C: , see if converted machine works fine and then add another disk (d:) and copy on it the content of the original 😧 disk

3) Convert again the whole system and if arrive again at 97% you'll have a little chanche to start VM with a few adjustment.

Bye

R

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RRiva | http://about.me/riccardoriva | http://www.riccardoriva.com