Restoring a Vista Complete PC Restore with VMWare Workstaion 7

Question

I upgraded my Vista machine to Windows 7 Pro. Before I did, I did a Vista PC Complete Backup thinking I would install VMWare Workstation and then restore my Vista OS just as it was before I upgraded. Everything worked well. The VM will boot from the Vista setup CD, the machine will find the backup file on the External USB, but right in the beginning of the restore I get a hard drive size error.

The Windows Complete PC Restore operation failed. Error details: The disk that is set as active in BIOS is too small to recover the original system disk. Replace the disk with a larger one and retry the restore operation. (0x80042407)

That is simple not true. It is the same disk. Any ideas would be great because I am not even sure I understand the error at this point.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Are you saying you took the physical machine, upgraded to Windows 7, then want to restore your Vista system to a virtual machine? If so that may not work. I don't think the drive and virtual system doesn't look like your computer to the old Vista system.

You can try verifying by booting a Linux live-CD like Ubuntu and run the gparted utility to verify what the partition/drive of the virtual machine looks like, then compare it to what you get when you boot with the liveCD on your physical bare machine.