I've been through Google's results for this issue but haven't found the magic bullet yet, so I figure it's time to let someone experienced look at my logs.
I've got a pair of new laptops (Asus N53SN-SV1 - core i5 quad, upgraded to 8mb RAM, Win 7 Home Premium). The goal is to install Ubuntu desktop on them and run Windows under Vmware Workstation 7.0. I'm using converter 4.3 standalone installed on the machines being converted. Every attempt so far has resuled in "FAILED: Unable to find the system volume, reconfiguration is not possible."
The drives are partitioned with a OEM recovery partition, C: system drive and a mostly-empty D: partition. I've told the converter to only convert C:, which is marked as the active and boot partition. There is no mirroring going on that I can tell from Window's settings. I tried setting the drive controler to IDE instead of the default "preserve source". Win 7 doesn't use Boot.ini. The conversion for Workstation necicitates that the number of virtual processers be capped at 2, and the vm RAM has been set to 2gb. For giggles, I tried booting the vm that the converter created under workstation: Windows starts to boot and then bluescreens, then on the next attempt will complain that the startup is broken (and can't be repaired). Trying to repair it from the Windows CD that we have fails. Safe mode doesn't work either.
If I missed anything, ask away.