What's the best way to create a virtual machine from an old Windows 2000 machine?
I found VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 4.0.1 which is the last version to support Windows 2000.
Are there any recommended alternatives? Are there any pitfalls I should expect? I'd like to run the VM on a Windows XP machine.
Answer
I've done this once, long time ago. The biggest pain was installing the correct drivers for the (virtual) hard disk. You must do it while this Windows installation still can boot on hardware.
If your hardware uses AHCI, and your virtual machine uses ATA, you're in trouble, you need to convert your Windows to ATA mode before you move to virtual. Google is full of recipes for this, but I cannot recommend any, since none worked for me.
So my advise is, make a copy of the disk, make sure you keep your original machine intact in case you need to reconfigure it again, install all needed drivers and try to boot in VMWare. Your success is very much dependent on your current hardware configuration.
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