After you convert a drive to a virtual hard disk and mount it in Virtual PC 2007, during bootup it may just give you a blank screen.
The only solution I’ve found to get past this is by replacing hal.dll with halacpi.dll from the operating system’s source CD.
Start up your Virtual PC 2007. Select CD menu and choose to either use a physical CD-ROM or if you have an ISO image of your operating system disk, choose “Capture ISO image…” and select the location of your ISO.
Reset your virtual machine and upon next boot, choose to boot from CD-ROM.
When the CD has finished loading needed drivers, choose “Recovery console” by typing “R”. See below image.
You need to choose the Windows location for the Recovery Console to continue. Typically, this is “1” unless you’re system has a special setup. You’ll need to specify your administrative password if you set one on that Windows installation. See below.
Once you have logged into the Windows setup, you need to change directory to system32 directory. See below.
After changing into system32, we need to expand D:i386halacpi.dl_. Note, substitute D with the letter of your CD-ROM.
I previously ran this before I created this walk-through. If you happen to get a prompt asking to overwrite the existing file, go ahead and specify “y”. See below.
After expanding halacpi.dl_ (it expands to halacpi.dll), we need to copy it over hal.dll. Hal.dll exists, already so tell it “y” to overwrite existing hal.dll. See below.
Reboot your virtual machine. If you are using Undo Disks, make sure when you’re completed that you do save the changes to the disk.
If there is a better solution, please let me know. I originally found a link in the Sysinternal’s forum for Disk2VHD that pointed to a blog posting. Start at section 8 in that blog post.
Category: Virtualization
Disk2VHD: Create a virtual disk of live system
Another great tool from Mark Russinovich at SysInternals called Disk2VHD I just discovered.
Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk – Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online. Disk2vhd uses Windows’ Volume Snapshot capability, introduced in Windows XP, to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include in a conversion. You can even have Disk2vhd create the VHDs on local volumes, even ones being converted (though performance is better when the VHD is on a disk different than ones being converted).
After creating a VHD, you can create a virtual machine and attach your VHD. Very slick. Especially since the fact you can run this on a live system!
Official Site
Direct Download (Official Site)