Booting an old Windows 7 physical drive in a modern VM

[snow519]

Hi all, I have read SIMILAR questions before but am stuck along the way

I pulled an old 2.5" SATA drive from my old laptop and hooked it up with a USB converter cable with zero issues.  My current Win10 machine opens the drive folders and everything is accessible - but I want to actually BOOT into the old OS, inside a VM.  Which I gather is highly possible.  I do not want to make an image if I don't have to.

I created a Windows 7 x64 VM, and assigned the physical drive as SCSI with no problems.  Hit Play to start the VM and it shows the Windows logo animating but then shortly after goes to a blue screen which flashes too quickly, but based on old posts, I'm assuming is the STOP error.

When the VM reboots, it instead offers me a menu with Finish Rebooting again (fails again of course at the Windows animation) or to go into Recovery mode.  When you choose recovery mode, it offers to restore an old backup which I decline, I don't want to modify the contents of the drive.  20 minutes or so goes by though, then it informs me it was unable to automatically fix it using the recovery tool.

So what EXACTLY are my next steps here?  It's gotta be close from what I gather, but I can't get past the blue screen.

Thank you very kindly in advance for any assistance, I will subscribe to this thread so I get instant replies

[Technogeezer]

I assume that you followed the steps in the Workstation documentation to assign the physical disk to the VM.

Some thoughts that I have.

What you're trying to do is the equivalent of moving an existing Windows installation to dissimilar hardware. There are many things that you have to know in order to get it to work and it's not as easy as you think it is.

What firmware type did you choose for your VM? BIOS or UEFI. That has to match how your old PC was configured.

What kind of bus was that drive connected to in your old laptop? That has to match as well for the virtual machine's virtual disk bus type. If it was connected via a SATA disk and you configure your virtual disk as a SCSI virtual disk type, that's not going to work. Windows-isms are at play here because the Windows boot process is configured for the type of bus that was present in your original PC. 

You also have the issue of drivers for hardware that was present on your PC but not present in your VM. You may need to go to safe mode and remove drivers for that PC hardware.

[snow519]

Hi there and thank you for the response..  I have been following various posts from across here and reddit and have just been trying to piece everything together.  I assigned the physical disk to the VM yes, but left it on SCSI as that is even marked (recommended) in VMware itself and both in the instructions I followed when someone asked a similar question in the past.  A user on here, "continuum" who also runs a website called sanbarrow.com is someone who I've seen comment on many threads in the past on this subject..  I was hoping maybe he could pop in and make short work of the issue but I am also pleased for any other advice, so thank you!

I'm going to pass on this since I have not been able to figure it out so far and I can't really just sit here and wait anymore, but thanks anyways

In the future this would be a much welcomed feature for VMware , to simplify this a heck of a lot more.