Re: VM Ware Player under Debian Lenny AMD64 on laptop

[Bjørn Mork <bjorn@mork.no>]

lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Lennart Sorensen) writes:

> Yes it probably could (it supports raw disk files so I see no reason it
> could not).  Of course you do have to prepare the windows system with
> the right device drivers for running on a new system, although that
> usually isn't too hard.  The mergeide.reg seems to cover the main problem.

I recently did the exercise of moving an existing XP installation from a
laptop to a KVM image.  Learned the mergeide.reg lesson the hard way.
You are much better off if you prepare this while you still can boot
Windows on the native hardware where it was originally installed.

But I did manage to fix it after creating the KVM image by mounting the
it on the host and using chntpw to modify the Windows registry.  Would
be great if someone wrote a .reg import script for chntpw, but I guess
nobody in their right mind uses it that way...

I also refreshed a previous lesson regarding Windows and the BPB
embedded in the partition boot sector.  Had to change the number of
heads to get rid of the feared "Disk read error" on boot (this appears
before you even get to the "missing ide driver" blue screen).

Finally I had to disable intelppm.sys and processr.sys to avoid the last
few blue screens.

Some useful references for anyone wanting to repeat this:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314082
http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2005/10/24/484461.aspx
http://www.geocities.com/thestarman3/asm/mbr/NTFSBR.htm


And do remember to make backups of the registry files, boot sectors and
other elements you are changing!  You really should consider doing it
all on a copy of the original installation. Windows is very fragile, and
it's very easy to fuck up something.  Get an USB drive and create a copy
of the windows disk there for experimenting.


Bjørn