Must TPM be disabled to virtualize a laptop?

[Flicka]

Courtesy of MS, I am doing what 10K++ other users must also be doing- running the old XP sp3 32bit in a VM on the same laptop now running Win7 Ultimate 32bit. Only, when I use Converter 4.x to P2V, then try to add the .vmdk file to WS7 in order to run it, I get an access error. IOW, I can't even get the file into WS7, much less start the VM. Since I must use a fingerprint to get into the laptop when running XP3 physically, I assume the TPM driver is stopping the process.

1. Am I correct in assuming there is still no TPM support in a VM?

2. Must I disable TPM in the BIOS before the P2V?

3. If #2 is "yes", is there a work-around? For instance, imaging the laptop using a 3rd party tool and then building the VM from that?

4. Is there some kind of setting in Converter that I missed which would have fixed this ahead of time?

Perhaps I am wrong to assume TPM is the culprit, but at this point, it's what makes sense. There's nothing in the Converter docs about TMP; laptop is a Thinkpad z61m.

Thanks!

Ted T.

[z_chris]

I've only heard TPM working on ESX. Are you doing disk encryption? If you are then you def would have to disable TPM, but to be really certain go ahead and disable it just the same.

Chris

[Flicka]

Apparently it wasn't TPM-- it was that most irritating of security necessities, file permissions. In this case, there was a weird twist-- even though the VM files were not write protected and I should have had the ability to write to them, it was based on my being in the administrator's group. Actually, I am an admin. for both the old physical laptop HD and the new HD (laptop is the same- just switched SATA HDs). The convert was done onto an external USB drive attached to the laptop. The physical machine names are the same; username and passwords the same. Nevertheless, it wasn't until I added my username itself to the file permissions that I could load and run the VM. The tipoff came after I changed the permssions on the .vmx file, loaded the VM and then tried to power it on. Here's what happened:

Unable to open file "F:\SophiaVM\SOPHIA-VM\SOPHIA-VM.vmdk": Insufficient permission to access file.

After fixing the permissions on that one, it worked. The takeaway is to always check file permissions first when swapping HDs on the same laptop with the same name on both drives. The admin groups may appear to be the same, but they aren't.

I did take some of the TPM off the physical laptop before I did the last convert, but not all of it. Parts of it are still hanging around the VM startup sequence...