getting started

[HZ52]

I am a complete newbe to this stuff. I would rate myself somewhat literate in technical stuff.

This is what I want to do.

I have a legacy computer. The hardware is dieing. It will run for a while and then just freeze.  No BSOD, it just freezes. Will do this randomly. even running in safe mode. Not application program dependent. It will happen running a program or just idling. Time between failures can range from under 15 mins to over a day and a half.

The machine runs Vista. Have we stopped laughing yet? But there are a couple of legacy programs that I can't move to a different machine and were registered to this particular machine.

What I would like to do is install the VMWare Player 16 on a different computer running win7. I would then mount the drive out of the Vista machine in this computer. I would then run the VMWare Converter on the partition that is the C: drive from the Vista machine to get an image which I could the run with the VMWare Player.

Have I got this right? Any gotchas that stand out?

Are the revs of the two programs appropriate to the OSs I am running?

Will there be an issue with the Vista drive being in a different computer?

I have run some thing like this (I think) with the microsoft virtual machine running XP on win7. Is this close to the same thing?

Thanks in advance or any help or direction.

Hank

[jburen]

You could use VMware Workstation to convert your physical computer to a virtual computer. But why use Windows 7 as the host OS? Support for Windows 7 has already ended! I would use Windows 10.

The latest version of VMware vCenter Converter Standalone is version 6.2.0.1. From the Release Notes:

You can install VMware Converter Standalone 6.2.x on the following platforms:

• Windows Vista SP2 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows Server 2008 SP2 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit)
• Windows 8 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows Server 2012 (64-bit)
• Windows 8.1 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows Server 2012 R2 (64-bit)
• Windows 10 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows Server 2016 (64-bit)

Converter Standalone 6.2.x supports the following guest operating systems:

• Windows Vista SP2 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows Server 2008 SP2 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit)
• Windows 8 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows Server 2012 (64-bit)
• Windows 8.1 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows Server 2012 R2 (64-bit)
• Windows 10 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows Server 2016 (64-bit)
• CentOS 6.x (32-bit and 64-bit)
• CentOS 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5 (64-bit)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.x (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5 (64-bit)
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.x (32-bit and 64-bit)
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11.x (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (32-bit and 64-bit)

[patanassov]

Hi

You could also install Converter inside the Vista machine and convert to a network share. Cross fingers it doesn't hang all the times during conversion.

If some app is tied to this particular machine, it may recognize the different virtual hardware as different machine and stop working. You should probably try to check.

In theory, you could also change the faulty part and keep the old box running; not the best option, though.

Regards,

Plamen

[HZ52]

Thanks,

But given the average time between failures I have experienced, seems unlikely that I could get it done.

I'll give it a couple of tries, but I'm skeptical.

Thanks again

Hank

[HZ52]

Thanks for the reply.

The reason I would use 7 is that that is what the machine runs at this time.

I see no compelling reason to go to 10 and all the headaches changing OSs would entail,

Thank you for the list of supported OS. I was frankly worried about Vista being supported.

Thanks again

Hank