If you have the right tools, knowledge and experience V2P is relatively painless however based on ones ability and the tools at hand it can be a daunting task and for some in the end doing a clean build may be the better way to go.
That said since the target Virtual Machine was a P2V and you're wanting to V2P back to the original source then it's actually much easier to do then starting with a clean built Virtual Machine and wanting to do a V2P with that. The difference being in your case is the target Virtual Machine has already been Syspreped and the biggest issue will probably be dealing with WPA (Windows Product Activation) if the OS is an OEM that was pre-installed by Dell. If it's a VLK version then it's a piece of cake.
Doing a clean built Virtual Machine and wanting to do a V2P requires that the system be properly prepared to be imaged and transfered to different hardware and there are products that can do that for you aside from using Microsoft System Preparation Tool and then use a Disk Imaging Product like Symantec Norton Ghost or similar.
Now in your particular case if I understood you right in that the target Virtual Machine was a P2V of the target for the V2P then it's almost as simple as creating a Disk Image of the target Virtual Machine and dropping that Disk Image on the Physical Machine. Since the Windows Registry would already contain the necessary information and the Drivers would already exist the amount of work will depend on what you uninstalled that was Dell and or Physical Machine specific and that can be reinstalled easily after dropping the Image on the Disk. You will probably have to adjust the c:\boot.ini since most Dell's have a Utility Partition and you probably didn't P2V that and only did the C: Drive.
Using a Dell Latitude D600 with a VLK Windows XP Professional SP3 I used VMware Converter (Starter Edition) 3.0.3 (89816) and running from within the Source I created a Virtual Machine and then ran it under Fusion 2.0.2 (147997) and upgraded the Virtual Hardware when prompted and installed VMware Tools. The entire process went without a glitch and was extremely quick since I do this type of work regularly and have an infrastructure in place where a fair amount of automation is in place to undertake these types of tasks. (An interesting thing to note is that on the Physical Machine the HDD was IDE and on the Converted Virtual Machine the HDD is now SCSI and this can be a source of STOP 7B BSOD if not properly prepared when going V2P from a clean built Virtual Machine.) I then uninstalled VMware Tools and downgraded the Virtual Hardware and after a couple reboots to make sure the Virtual Machine booted fine after removing VMware Tools and downgrading the Virtual Hardware I then booted the Virtual Machine with an ISO Image of a Windows Live OS CD built to prep Systems for Ghost Imaging and in this case all I did was edit the c:\boot.ini so it point to the proper Partition and then Ghosted the Virtual Hard Drive to the proper Partition on the Physical Hard Drive and after Ghosting the Dell Latitude D600 booted without a hitch and after detecting new hardware it rebooted and all was done and unless I looked in Device Manager using the information in Device Manager does not display devices that are not connected to the Windows XP-based computer one might never have know that this had gone from P2V and then V2P.
I've attached a zip archive of the Device Managed after exposing the unconnected devices and they are grayed out in comparison to the attached working devices however note that not all grayed out devices belonged to the Virtual Machine and there are some that are supposed to be grayed out however if you look at the names on some of them it's obvious they belong to VMware. These screen captures are just to show the hardware differences in this particular case and is not meant to necessarily be part of the process although I do typically remove the appropriate disconnected devices when applicable to what I'm doing.
So if your situation is as I think it should be a relatively easy process to accomplish.
Message was edited by: WoodyZ
