Re: Converting a real to a virtual PC

On Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:18:09 +0100, "Christian Barmala"
<> wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I used disk2vhd
>(http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../ee656415.aspx) on my WinXP
>32 bit laptop to created a virtual harddisk "laptop.vhd". Then I creadted a
>Windows Virtual PC on Windows 7 64 bit and used this laptop.vhd instead of a
>fresh empty vhd. When I tried to start the virtual machine, i.e. boot from
>laptop.vhd, I just got a VM Window with a black screen inside.
>
>Has anybody successfully converted a real machine to a virtual machine this
>way? Does anybody have an idea what went wrong in my case?
>
>Details:
>- My laptop just has a single drive C: , size 111 GB, 30 GB used.
>- I created the VHD on an external disk E: connected to the USB port.
>- disk2vhd didn't provide many options to check or uncheck and didn't show
>any error messages. When I started the process, it claimed to take 10 hours,
>but when I came back after about 1 hour, it finished already.
>- I can successfully mount and access the vhd file on my Win7 computer, but
>I wasn't able to boot a virtual machine from it. I used 2GB of memory for
>the VM, which is the same amount of memory as my laptop has.
>
>Christian

It is probably not a bootable VHD, just a backup copy of your disk.
But that aside, you will probably not succeed even if you managed to
make the VHD bootable because the laptop's hardware drivers are
embedded in this image and the hardware is *completely* different from
the hardware seen by an operating system running as a guest in VPC! So
my guess is that it will blusecreen as soon as you make it bootable.

To do Physical2Virtual conversion you need more sophisticated tools
than this....

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)

The referenced disk2vhd utility is from SysInternals, now owned by
Microsoft, and claims to make a vhd that is bootable in Virtual PC. I
haven't used that utility, but all of the other SysInternals utilities I've
ever used worked exactly as claimed. Maybe try reading the instructions and
comments again on the download page to see if you missed anything. The
documentation says the vhd must be attached as an IDE disk. The source
system must be at least WinXP SP2. Do not attach to VHDs on the same system
on which you created them if you plan on booting from them. If you do so,
Windows will assign the VHD a new disk signature to avoid a collision with
the signature of the VHD's source disk. Windows references disks in the boot
configuration database (BCD) by disk signature, so when that happens Windows
booted in a VM will fail to locate the boot disk.

"Bo Berglund" <> wrote in message
news:...
> On Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:18:09 +0100, "Christian Barmala"
> <> wrote:
>
>>Hi,
>>
>>I used disk2vhd
>>(http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../ee656415.aspx) on my
>>WinXP
>>32 bit laptop to created a virtual harddisk "laptop.vhd". Then I creadted
>>a
>>Windows Virtual PC on Windows 7 64 bit and used this laptop.vhd instead of
>>a
>>fresh empty vhd. When I tried to start the virtual machine, i.e. boot from
>>laptop.vhd, I just got a VM Window with a black screen inside.
>>
>>Has anybody successfully converted a real machine to a virtual machine
>>this
>>way? Does anybody have an idea what went wrong in my case?
>>
>>Details:
>>- My laptop just has a single drive C: , size 111 GB, 30 GB used.
>>- I created the VHD on an external disk E: connected to the USB port.
>>- disk2vhd didn't provide many options to check or uncheck and didn't show
>>any error messages. When I started the process, it claimed to take 10
>>hours,
>>but when I came back after about 1 hour, it finished already.
>>- I can successfully mount and access the vhd file on my Win7 computer,
>>but
>>I wasn't able to boot a virtual machine from it. I used 2GB of memory for
>>the VM, which is the same amount of memory as my laptop has.
>>
>>Christian
>
> It is probably not a bootable VHD, just a backup copy of your disk.
> But that aside, you will probably not succeed even if you managed to
> make the VHD bootable because the laptop's hardware drivers are
> embedded in this image and the hardware is *completely* different from
> the hardware seen by an operating system running as a guest in VPC! So
> my guess is that it will blusecreen as soon as you make it bootable.
>
> To do Physical2Virtual conversion you need more sophisticated tools
> than this....
> --
> Bo Berglund (Sweden)

>Do not attach to VHDs on the same system
>on which you created them if you plan on booting from them. If you do so,
>Windows will assign the VHD a new disk signature to avoid a collision with
>the signature of the VHD's source disk.

That's only if you mount it on the host for boot, running it in a VM
is not a problem.

--
Bob Comer



On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:04:12 -0500, "Paul Shapiro"
<> wrote:

>The referenced disk2vhd utility is from SysInternals, now owned by
>Microsoft, and claims to make a vhd that is bootable in Virtual PC. I
>haven't used that utility, but all of the other SysInternals utilities I've
>ever used worked exactly as claimed. Maybe try reading the instructions and
>comments again on the download page to see if you missed anything. The
>documentation says the vhd must be attached as an IDE disk. The source
>system must be at least WinXP SP2. Do not attach to VHDs on the same system
>on which you created them if you plan on booting from them. If you do so,
>Windows will assign the VHD a new disk signature to avoid a collision with
>the signature of the VHD's source disk. Windows references disks in the boot
>configuration database (BCD) by disk signature, so when that happens Windows
>booted in a VM will fail to locate the boot disk.
>
>"Bo Berglund" <> wrote in message
>news:.. .
>> On Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:18:09 +0100, "Christian Barmala"
>> <> wrote:
>>
>>>Hi,
>>>
>>>I used disk2vhd
>>>(http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../ee656415.aspx) on my
>>>WinXP
>>>32 bit laptop to created a virtual harddisk "laptop.vhd". Then I creadted
>>>a
>>>Windows Virtual PC on Windows 7 64 bit and used this laptop.vhd instead of
>>>a
>>>fresh empty vhd. When I tried to start the virtual machine, i.e. boot from
>>>laptop.vhd, I just got a VM Window with a black screen inside.
>>>
>>>Has anybody successfully converted a real machine to a virtual machine
>>>this
>>>way? Does anybody have an idea what went wrong in my case?
>>>
>>>Details:
>>>- My laptop just has a single drive C: , size 111 GB, 30 GB used.
>>>- I created the VHD on an external disk E: connected to the USB port.
>>>- disk2vhd didn't provide many options to check or uncheck and didn't show
>>>any error messages. When I started the process, it claimed to take 10
>>>hours,
>>>but when I came back after about 1 hour, it finished already.
>>>- I can successfully mount and access the vhd file on my Win7 computer,
>>>but
>>>I wasn't able to boot a virtual machine from it. I used 2GB of memory for
>>>the VM, which is the same amount of memory as my laptop has.
>>>
>>>Christian
>>
>> It is probably not a bootable VHD, just a backup copy of your disk.
>> But that aside, you will probably not succeed even if you managed to
>> make the VHD bootable because the laptop's hardware drivers are
>> embedded in this image and the hardware is *completely* different from
>> the hardware seen by an operating system running as a guest in VPC! So
>> my guess is that it will blusecreen as soon as you make it bootable.
>>
>> To do Physical2Virtual conversion you need more sophisticated tools
>> than this....
>> --
>> Bo Berglund (Sweden)

On Tue, 19 Jan 2010 08:51:25 -0500, Robert Comer
<bobcomer-removeme-@mindspring.com> wrote:

>>Do not attach to VHDs on the same system
>>on which you created them if you plan on booting from them. If you do so,
>>Windows will assign the VHD a new disk signature to avoid a collision with
>>the signature of the VHD's source disk.
>
>That's only if you mount it on the host for boot, running it in a VM
>is not a problem.

Today I used both disk2vhd and VMWare Converter 4 to test P2V on a
physical (HP) workstation with a 160 Gb drive. Only 32 Gb of tha is
actually used.

The disk2vhd tool does not give you an option to resize the disk,
which makes the P2V conversion rather more difficult and time
consuming than it could have been when dealing with large source disks
into VPC2007.

The disk2vhd has an option to "Fix up HAL for VirtualPC", which I
guess is a way to prepare for the differences in hardware. I used
this. The process took about 2 hours and resulted in a VHD file with a
38.9 Gb size. This file was placed on the C: drive of the source disk
itself, possible thanks to the snapshot capability of XP.

VMWare Converter 4 does more, it creates a complete virtual machine
with all the settings appropriate for the guest taken from the
physical machine and the limitations of the target virtual environment
(WS 6.5 compatible).
And it has the option of specifying the target drive size, so I set it
to be 100 Gb.
Conversion took about 1:20 hours to finish with the result written to
a USB connected drive on the source PC. The size of the final disk
file was 24.8 Gb. Amazingly this is less than what is reported as the
used capacity on the source PC!

Tomorrow I will try and start up these machines in VPC2007-SP1 (the
VHD) and VMWare Workstation 7 (the VMDK).
Will be interesting to see what will happen....

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)

"Bo Berglund" wrote
> Today I used both disk2vhd and VMWare Converter 4 to test P2V on a
> physical (HP) workstation with a 160 Gb drive. Only 32 Gb of tha is
> actually used.
....
> Tomorrow I will try and start up these machines in VPC2007-SP1 (the
> VHD)

I doubt it will work, as the documentation describes:
"Note: Virtual PC supports a maximum virtual disk size of 127GB. If you
create a VHD from a larger disk it will not be accessible from a Virtual PC
VM."

But I have a 160gb WinXP laptop I would like to virtualize before installing
Win7, so I'm looking forward to your report :-)

/Peter

On Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:25:11 +0100, "Peter D. Jørgensen"
<> wrote:

>
>"Bo Berglund" wrote
>> Today I used both disk2vhd and VMWare Converter 4 to test P2V on a
>> physical (HP) workstation with a 160 Gb drive. Only 32 Gb of tha is
>> actually used.
>...
>> Tomorrow I will try and start up these machines in VPC2007-SP1 (the
>> VHD)
>
>I doubt it will work, as the documentation describes:
>"Note: Virtual PC supports a maximum virtual disk size of 127GB. If you
>create a VHD from a larger disk it will not be accessible from a Virtual PC
>VM."
>
>But I have a 160gb WinXP laptop I would like to virtualize before installing
>Win7, so I'm looking forward to your report :-)
>
>/Peter
>
First report:

1) Disk2Vhd
As I noted before disk2vhd did not offer an option to reduce the size
of the target disk below the 128 Gb allowed by VPC2007.
So the resulting VHD file has a disk size of 160 Gb just like the
source disk even though the used part of that disk is just 32 Gb. :-(
When I tried it on a VPC guest it was recognized as 128 Gb and
corrupted....
I also tried to create a new virtual machine with a 100 Gb empty drive
where I attached the converted VHD as disk 2. Then I booted it off my
ISO version of the Acronis boot CD in order to try and clone the
converted disk onto the smaller disk. But that failed too because
Acronis saw the source disk as corrupt (and size 128 Gb).
Intersetingly the VHD is perfectly OK, I can view it in WinImage and I
see all the data there.
So I tried VhdResizer, which has been mentioned here before. But this
tool does not give an option to make the disk smaller, only bigger!
So I'd say that this type of P2V into VPC2007 is doomed unless someone
can point to a tool that will actually resize a VHD properly both ways
(up and down)!

2) VMWare Converter 4
Unlike the Microsoft solution, this worked right away! I just attached
the created virtual machine to my VMWare Workstation 7 and fired it up
successfully.
Before I did so I changed networking to be "host only" so the guest
would not appear on the network. The reason for this is that the
source PC is still on the network and is a domain attached PC so if I
allow the clone to also appear it will cause grief in Active
Directory.
But as a side effect of this the guest is not on line to the Internet
and when it starts up it requires activation, which is not possible
right now. So I had to shut it down. Will activate tonight when I am
back home and can let it reach the internet without problems with AD
at work.

Conclusions
My advice is to switch from Microsoft VPC2007 into VMWare Workstation
7 (at a price) or Player 3 (free offering) and use their converter for
the P2V. The result is a working guest which also has full USB and
DirectXX graphics support.

The only possibility to use VPC2007 and the disk2vhd tool is to first
use a partitioning tool on the source machine to make the source
partition smaller than 128 Gb.
Or alternately if someone here can suggest a method/tool that can be
used on a VHD that is too big but contains small amounts of data to
shrink the disk partition size.

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)

Is there anyone reading this thread that has a suggestion for how one
can shrink a VHD image that was created by disk2vhd from a drive that
was > 130 Gb but contains less data than 130 Gb?

I have checked ways that do *not* work:

1) Use Acronis in a VPC2007 guest to clone the big disk onto a smaller
one. Does not work since the VPC2007 BIOS does not recognize the big
VHD drive at its true size. And Acronis is not smarter than BIOS....

2) Make an Acronis backup on the source PC and use this to restore
onto a smaller VHD in a guest. Does not work because now the HAL
adjustments are not made so the VHD is not bootable without
bluescreening (I don't have Universal Restore). And it is not handling
a disk2vhd image anyway.

3) Use VHDResizer from VMToolkit to reduce the size of the disk. Does
not work because it does not offer the option of *reducing* the size,
only to increase it.

What I have not tried yet is:

4) Use a VirtualServer 2005 guest and attach the big VHD as a SCSI
drive that does not have size limitations. Then use PartitionManager
or similar to reduce the partition size below 128 Gb.
Then when that is done use Acronis to clone the partition onto a new
VHD disk smaller than 128 Gb.
I guess this would work, but involves multiple time-consuming steps as
well as obtaining a commercial software package (PartitionMagic) just
for this single job.
But can the VHD be attached to a VS2005 guest as a SCSI drive in the
first place?

Is there some other method that can be used in situations like this?
--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)

Possibilities:

1: Get universal restore, that's what I use.

2: Your virtual server idea should work well to boot in a partition
manager to copy and shrink the partition to a new <127G VHD. I don't
know if you can just shrink the partition on the existing VHD to be
under 127G and that would work, theoretically it could.

3: Don't know if this will work but it's easy, mount the VHD in Win7,
use computer management/disk management to shrink the partition to
<127G, unmount and try booting VPC from the VHD.

--
Bob Comer


On Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:34:21 +0100, Bo Berglund
<> wrote:

>Is there anyone reading this thread that has a suggestion for how one
>can shrink a VHD image that was created by disk2vhd from a drive that
>was > 130 Gb but contains less data than 130 Gb?
>
>I have checked ways that do *not* work:
>
>1) Use Acronis in a VPC2007 guest to clone the big disk onto a smaller
>one. Does not work since the VPC2007 BIOS does not recognize the big
>VHD drive at its true size. And Acronis is not smarter than BIOS....
>
>2) Make an Acronis backup on the source PC and use this to restore
>onto a smaller VHD in a guest. Does not work because now the HAL
>adjustments are not made so the VHD is not bootable without
>bluescreening (I don't have Universal Restore). And it is not handling
>a disk2vhd image anyway.
>
>3) Use VHDResizer from VMToolkit to reduce the size of the disk. Does
>not work because it does not offer the option of *reducing* the size,
>only to increase it.
>
>What I have not tried yet is:
>
>4) Use a VirtualServer 2005 guest and attach the big VHD as a SCSI
>drive that does not have size limitations. Then use PartitionManager
>or similar to reduce the partition size below 128 Gb.
>Then when that is done use Acronis to clone the partition onto a new
>VHD disk smaller than 128 Gb.
>I guess this would work, but involves multiple time-consuming steps as
>well as obtaining a commercial software package (PartitionMagic) just
>for this single job.
>But can the VHD be attached to a VS2005 guest as a SCSI drive in the
>first place?
>
>Is there some other method that can be used in situations like this?

On Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:39:02 +0100, "Christian Barmala"
<> wrote:

>Hi Bo,
>
>"Bo Berglund" <> wrote:
>> The disk2vhd has an option to "Fix up HAL for VirtualPC
>
>Where is this option hidden? I didn't find any options at all? The command
>line syntax is "disk2vhd <drive(s)> <VHD file>" and the GUI has in input
>field for the VHD-file and checkboxes for the available drives. I didn't
>even find a "version" command to check if I'm using an outdated version of
>disk2vhd.

I downloaded the very latest version yesterday after seeing the
reference here. The program says Disk2Vhd v1.4 right on top of its gui
window.
Above the selection box for the VHD filename is the checkbox named
"Fix up HAL for VirtualPC".

I assume this is their way of handling the different hardware inside
the guest of VPC2007.

>A colleague intends to
>- shrink the physical disk with partition magic,

Why not test disk2vhd 1.4 with the HAL checkbox active at this point?
disk2vhd can be set to include only the volume you check into the VHD
(at least this is what I believe) so it should now be able to make a
VHD which is adapted for use with VPC2007 directly.

>- boot from the Acronis CD and create an image of the shrunken partition,
>- create an empty VM,
>- boot the VM with the Acronis CD and
>- restore from the Acronis tib-file

This would require the "Universal Restore" option in Acronis to have
any success at all of working.

>
>Yet another idea would be to convert the tib file into a vhd. The latest
>Acronis version can do this.

VHD format is not enaough, you need to fix up the hardware differences
as well....


--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)

On Wed, 20 Jan 2010 10:15:07 +0100, Bo Berglund
<> wrote:

>On Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:25:11 +0100, "Peter D. Jørgensen"
><> wrote:
>

>2) VMWare Converter 4
>Unlike the Microsoft solution, this worked right away! I just attached
>the created virtual machine to my VMWare Workstation 7 and fired it up
>successfully.
>Before I did so I changed networking to be "host only" so the guest
>would not appear on the network. The reason for this is that the
>source PC is still on the network and is a domain attached PC so if I
>allow the clone to also appear it will cause grief in Active
>Directory.
>But as a side effect of this the guest is not on line to the Internet
>and when it starts up it requires activation, which is not possible
>right now. So I had to shut it down. Will activate tonight when I am
>back home and can let it reach the internet without problems with AD
>at work.

Now back home and could bridge the guest network adapter to my main
NIC and thus get an Internet connection to the guest.
Windows activation popped up again and now I could enter the code and
activate successfully.

After installing VMWare Tools (new version for WorkStation 7) and
rebooting the guest it now looks perfectly OK!
And all of the USB stuff is retained too.
This will run on VMWare Player 3 (free software) just fine.

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)