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I have an 80gb hard drive that is quite old, I expect it to fail soon. So I am trying to clone it to a bigger, newer disk or simply make a virtual machine out of it.

I used various tools to clone my disk, Disk2vhd and Acronis TrueImage. Both have yielded similar results but let's say I'm using TrueImage since I prefer that method.

The disk has two partitions : one Windows XP and another with Windows XPE. Here is an image of the partitions as they are on the new disk. Ignore the free space to get an idea of the old drive layout.

(I cannot post images due to a lack of reputation, here is the link to it.)

Since the machine that was running this drive initially may disappear or move around I would like to clone the disk to a virtual machine or at least have it running on another computer.

To clone it, since I do not have access to the Disk Cloning feature on the TI trial, I first made a backup and exported that to my computer. Then I plugged a portable drive enclosure and added a 200gb drive to it and restored my backup on it. So far so good. But when I boot it, I get the boot screen where I can select my OS. I select Windows XP and then I see the Windows loading screen for maybe a second and then I have a Blue Screen. The error is STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error} with status code 0xc0000034.

After a few searches I found an article : Article. I followed the Most Helpful Reply from A. User. So I used a Windows Xp disk to get to the repair command prompt and do a chkdsk /r and it repaired a few errors. Also, I did the procedure to copy win32k.sys from the servicepack files using the command

copy c:\windows\ServicePackFiles\i386\win32k.sys   c:\windows\system32

It did copy a file but when I boot up I get a new error code : 0xc000026c. Which, according to the link, indicates that the file is corrupted.

I can press F8 when windows is loading to try booting into safe mode, both GUI and command line and it still crashes. When booting the safe mode command line I see the drivers being listed but it eventually crashes anyway (the last one loaded is Mup.sys).

Last thing, when I boot in my second partition I get an HAL error :

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt : <Windows root>\system32\hal.dll.

I'm at the end of my trails, how can I successfully clone my disk so I can use it in a virtual machine ? Between cloning it to a physical machine or a virtual one I'd rather have the flexibility of a virtual machine but cloning it anywhere would be a plus.

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Although you have mentioned that you would like to use TrueImage, I have had some success doing a P2V conversion using VMWare P2V Converter. You install the P2V converter software on a target machine (the machine with the bad HDD) and you install another copy on another machine. On the target machine you configure the application to create an image and store it on the remote machine. In the end, you end up with a VMDK image (VMWare format). You did not mention what hypervisor you are planning on running the image on, but if it is a non-vmware based hypervisor there are other tools that will allow you to convert an VMDK to VHD or whatever other format you want. Make sure to fully test the VM after the image is created.

Here is a link to the VMWare P2V converter (freeware, but you do need an account with VMWare to download)

http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/

Here is a link to the StarWind VMDK to VHD Converter (Freeware).. looks like it can convert VHD to VMDK as well.

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/converter

I have used this method on 20 or so windows installs with various issues to make sure I have a full, bootable copy of the OS before I do a complete reinstall. Out of the approx 20 times I have used it, I think I have had it fail 2 times total - but I was able to kick off the imaging process again and it worked the second time.

If you are going to use this method, I highly reccomend that you launch the VMWare P2V app as an administrator to get past some of the issues you might run into if you run it as a regular application.

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  • I'm looking to use Hyper-V for the host. I am starting the image process with mostly the default settings. Will check back and post updates when I tired doing the conversion and import. Nov 25, 2013 at 21:58
  • After a good long while of copying data around, this method worked perfectly ! Using all default settings produced a hardware agnostic vhd that I could use in Hyper-V. Thanks ! Nov 26, 2013 at 18:37
  • Sweet! Glad I could be of service!
    – Richie086
    Dec 3, 2013 at 22:52

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