Physical-to-VM Conversion causes Blue Screen loop on Dell comptuers
I encountered this problem today when I tried to convert 2 Dell PCs into VMware virtual machines. The conversion run fine without any errors at all, but the new VMs won't boot up properly. I'd get the Windows 7 blue-screen-of-death saying something about disks being changed (too fast to read through), followed by a reboot and back to the blue screen again. The source machines were both Dell Optiplex 990 PCs and upon checking the settings, I quickly noticed that the hard disks on the VMs are IDEs. I'm certain that my Dells have SATA, so I knew exactly where the problem was. I remember seeing this same problem with physical machines when SATA was new. Windows would crash if you changed to SATA drives and don't update the BIOS setting to "compatibility mode." The thing that would've prevented this from happening was if I set the correct controller type on the VMWare Converter wizard. Instead, I went with all the default options and VMWare uses IDE if there...