Darn, this problem is driving me nuts:

I got a Windows XP in VMware as a VMmachine that I use as a template (freshly installed, with Firefox und antivirus) and would like to use is also when I install a physical machine.

Now so far all attempts to use trueimage and clone the virtual disk to a real disk and then boot from it have failed.
XP does not start up, although it is properly written on the disk, usualy with a variety of error messages like "no operating system" or "disk error".
It does not get far, I cannot even select safe mode.

After spending an obscene amount of hours, I am still not closer to a solution. I tried repairing the system, fixboot, fixmbr and all was totally useless. In Linux this is a piece of cake (change the device name), but the intransparent nature of XP is a toughy, since nobody has a real clue how this beast boots up exactly.

I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that VMware uses SCSI disks (virtualized) and the target physical systems use IDE and thus windows crashes during startup.

Is there a program that I can reset the device driver DB (or whatever XP uses) so it will not be stuck on SCSI?
Sysprep does not do anything really, using it in factory mode.

Any pointers appreciated

Markus

The plug and play in Windows isn't as advanced as in Linux so you need to manually delete the scsi drivers and load a simple IDE driver before you clone it. Then after it boots under the simple IDe driver you can detect the new chipset the system is using.

Yes, I have seen that. It comes down to the drivers that need installing on Windows for pretty anything, while on Linux it is all automatic and invisible for the users.
I think Linux has overtaken Windows in some aspects already.

But HOW do I do this? How can I erase it? Does anyone know a tool that does it? Can it be that I am the only one that stages machines first on VMware before deploying to physical?

thanks

Markus

You'll go to the device manager and delete them from there. Honestly, it doesn't work all the time. You probably won't get this to work. This is almost the same as trying to install on a dell and then ghost it over to an HP (or even some other dells). You're not going to do this easily if at all. You run into the same problems if your motherboard fries and you have to buy a new and different one. You just get ready to re-install.

Sorry to sound all doom and gloom about it, but I've invested some time in doing something similar with ghost.

I think you'd have more luck with something that takes all the settings and programs you have installed and put them on another computer. I think Norton Ghost has this capability.

To do your HP to Dell swap there are more devices which need deleted, usually MB chipset stuff, basically the same issue as with IDE drivers but with other drivers.

There is a vmware KB article on how to take a dual boot and make a virtual guest from it that walks through the steps. I've done it on my laptop and the procedure is the same. If you need to go back and forth to test, then make a hardware profile or two and load the different drivers under each.

This is interesting. I just did something like this. For the purpose of eventually making a slipstream disc with programs preinstalled.
Its a real pain.
Basically its what the other posters said.

You have to start off with the same initial machine. Copy your hardware profile in the device manager. Then reboot with new profile on the same machine.

And then, this the only guaranteed or close to guaranteed way for it work.
You have to manually add the ide/scsi driver that matches the chipset of the motherboard you're about to switch over to. Because standard ide is a lie really.


Then you take the image over to the new machine and boot windows up in safe mode.
If you can make it to safe mode, you'll probably be fine.

And now you know why I want to make a pre-installation disc.

Look at the XP instructions here
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws45/d...alboot_ws.html

Thats basically what I'm doing. Build a dual boot, then boot under windows and make a new profile and set it to manually select. then boot under the "virtual" profile and replace the IDE drivers so it will boot up under under vmware then you can install the vmware driver. There really is a very basic generic IDE driver you install that will boot under any ide chipset just without great performance.

ahh, here it is

http://kb.vmware.com/vmtnkb/search.d...eId=SAL_Public

you load the standard dual channel IDE controller (step 7).

Thanks a lot all you people. This is a tough cookie.

Ghost (and it's new WORKING OVER THE NETWORK incarnation True Image) will do wonders. I have had no problems with it really, you can even move over to a totally different chipset, it will do a lot of "new hardware found", but still boot. The IDE / SCSI problem though does not let you even select safe mode, it crashes before that, so no way to access the system.
I have even put an image made for an intel on a AMD and got it to boot, but clearly, it is not really what you should do.

so let's check out how to solve this puppy ;-)

Markus

Tried again and failed again.

Well, there are some good pointers in the vmware support articles, like creating a new hardware profile and removing/updating the SCSI driver / IDE drivers there, but to no avail.

The interesting thing: XP does not even show up the dialog where you can select the hardware profiles, which is kind of dumb if you are going to boot windows with two different controllers and 2 fitting hardware profiles if you cannot even get that far.

I will now create a image with trueimage on a physical machine and use that for physical machines, I am not ready to waste more time on something that might never work and that I have no idea how to solve (and neither probably has anybody else, either because XP is too dumb and archaic an OS or because MS has no interest of letting us figure out how the boot up works)

I heard once that there is a hack, erasing some registry keys that define the drivers of the boot disk. Does anyone know a tool that can do that? Remember, I cannot boot into that windows to change it, so I would need a tool that can open the registry of the windows install without booting into it.

Markus

Just to provide a solution for the problem:

The product is called Trueimage Universal Restore and when creating an image, you can specify that is should use universal restore.
You can then restore that image on pretty much all hardware, provided that you give it the drivers it needs to boot up (i.e. SATA driver, since XP does not support many SATA controllers without external drivers)

Markus