How to migrate physical computer to Microsoft Virtual PC machine - Part 2

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6. Restart the physical server and boot from Acronis True Image Rescue Disk. Create disk image(s) of all the partitions and drives in the physical server. True Image allows you to save it over network to a different computer - save it to the virtual machine from step 1.

7. Create the destination virtual machine. Size of the hard drive was not issue for me, since most of the servers just had operating system and couple of applications installed, no databases or large files. I usually choose 10GB size. Make sure the hard drive has fixed size, not dynamically expanding, it will help a lot speed up the hard drive access times.

8. Put the Acronis Rescue Disk in CD drive on the Virtual PC host. Mount the hard drive from the Windows XP machine where the Acronis TIB archive is saved and boot the virtual machine. It should boot from the CD and load the Acronis Utility.

9. Restore the TIB image to the destination drive, this will take from minutes to hours, depending on the size of the image.

10. Turn of the virtual machine, unmount the second hard drive, eject the Acronis Rescue Disk, put in boot disk with operating system that was installed on the physical machine and turn on the machine again.

11. Boot from CD and choose recovery console. Otherwise the boot process will freeze on blank screen before showing the Windows logo.

12. Login into the installation (1. C:\WINDOWS) using local administrator password (or recovery password for Active Directory) and execute the following commands (assuming CD drive is D:):
copy D:\i386\hal.dl_ c:\windows\system32\hal.dll
copy D:\i386\ntoskrnl.ex_ c:\windows\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
Reboot the virtual machine.

13. Wait for the computer to start (first time when it detects new hardware it always takes a lot of time), then log in, install Virtual Machine additions, change the network settings, and you're done!

14. Now you can transfer this finished virtual machine to the Virtual Server 2005. For even faster hard disk access, add virtual SCSI adapter (Virtual PC doesn't support it) and change the type of the virtual hard drive from IDE to SCSI - according to Microsoft, this should improve disk access by about 20% over IDE.