Virtual Machine from HP Recovery partition possible?

[PollieXmas]

Anybody,

My XP Pro HP (nc8430) died (motherboard). I recovered the HDD and now want to build a (vmware) virtual machine from it but after several attempts are starting to wonder if this is at all possible? Most of the tutorials/guides assumes the machine being copied is still operational or requires the initial instaal discs.

My HP (nc6220) cannot read the Initial Recovery Point DVD's I created after the initial install, so I cannot use it to create the virtual machine. Older machines thinks the DVD's are CD-Rom's and newer/equivalent machines does not recognise the file system.

The idea then was to create/start a virtual machine with an iso boot disc that would allow me to clone the HP Recovery partition to the an empty partition/disc in the virtual machine, hoping that when I reboot the virtual machine it would think it is starting for the first time, allowing me to install XP on the virtual machine. However whenever I want to start the virtual from a bootable iso (g4u, clonemaxx, etc) file, it does not want to start, even though it starts just fine with gparted!?

I finally found this post http://forums.cnet.com/5208-6142_102-0.html?threadID=258853 which mentioned how to create a bootable iso image from the recovery partition using nlite, but this too seem to require you to build recovery cd's from the recovery partition.

Any ideas? Am I missing something?

Thanks

Paul

Ps. Attached are the dir listing of all the root files on the two partitions (C: and Recovery partitions) of the HDD I wish to "restore"/"re-install" to a virtual machine. The XPPro directory on the C: drive was where I copied the contents of the Recovery partition in an attempt to create the boot disc using NLite and WinFuture_XP_iso_builder. As for the DVD's I cannot see the file system...

Pps. Thanks for the interest/help so far.

HP_Recovery_Partition_dirlist.txt

HP_C_Drive_dirlist.txt

Edited May 18, 2009 by PollieXmas

[johnhc]

PollieXmas, please post screen shots of a Windows Explorer view from the recovery CD you created and the recovery partition you have saved. This sounds like a very tough problem, but we can take a look. Enjoy, John.

[Guest]

Or, if you're familiar with DOS and as an alternative to screenshots, open a command prompt in your source directory and type: "dir /b >filelist.txt". Then attach filelist.txt to your next post.

[PollieXmas]

Hi All,

I'm starting to believe that it might be the way that my virtual machine is setup that is the problem...

I received a (bootable) HP recover CD which is used to recover the range of machines that I had. It boots find in my old (working) notebook to the point where I can choose to recover my notebook. However, when I use this cd to boot my virtual machine, the virtual machine seems to hang using 100% CPU and eventually giving me the (screen) console with an error message that the username and password failed.

The virtual machine is setup as a XP machine with two disc drives. I'm booting this machine for the first time with the recovery CD, so I presume the problem can be that the drives are not formatted as FAT32/NTFS yet, so there are no partitions for the CD to recover the data/machine to?

Anyway, will try formatting the discs first and see if that makes a difference.

Thanks

Paul