Create VMachine from some old hard drives?

[IReallTryhard]

Create VMachine from some old hard drives?

I have some old hard drives with win2000 and would like to convert them to run within Player. I tried using VMWare Converter and a running PC and it wanted 2-days and 11-hours to make a VMachine of a 50% full, 14G drive. Hmmm. So, I let it have it's head and eventually it was complete. Then added it to Player's list and started it.

It got about 1/2 way through the win2000 boot sequence then win2000 declared a disk error. Stating that the boot drive letter was incorrect and that windows could only start from a C drive.

Does anyone have any better solutions to making a VMachine of these hard drives? Either running in a desktop box or just from the hard drives?

I tried making a Macrium Reflect image and convert that to VHD, but the Player could not read the VHD and Convert would not convert as there was no .vmc file.

Thanks

[WoodyZ]

There are quite a number of different ways to accomplish the task and I've done it many different ways.

The easiest way for me is to attach the external disk directly to the VM using an external USB enclosure and then booting the VM with a Windows Live OS ISO Image (a modified WinPE Image) containing the appropriate tools and utilities using Symantec Norton Ghost to image the old disk to the new VM's disk and then inject the necessary drivers and Windows Registry entries for the Mass Storage Controller and Keyboard to be able to get past what would be a BSOD upon booting the VM otherwise.