Vista - ving Vista/X{ installation from physical PC to Vitual PC

I had posted this thread over in the Vista deployment and imaging TechNet
forums but was referred to these groups.

Here's the link to my original thread and my original question-

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/...8203&SiteID=17

Hello all,

*(see a few posts down for exact text from the book)



In the MCITP Vista Client for Enterprise Technicians book by Tony Northrup
and JC Mackin there's a side note that describes how using ImageX to capture
a user's "old" workstation then applying that image to a Virtual PC (on a new
workstation) would make migration to Vista easier. The logic beind this is
that it would allow users to go back and reference their old workstations in
case something didn't work. I thought this was one of the greatest ideas I've
seen so I tried it myself.



I captured my Vista Enterprise (x86) installation from my office workstation
using ImageX then created a new Virtual PC on a different workstation. I
booted into our WinPE environment with our WDS server and used DiskPart to
create the primary partition, assign a drive letter, mark as active etc. I
formatted it then used ImageX to apply the captured image from my "old"
workstation.



When the PC rebooted it stopped during the boot manager process and gave me
the cannot find the "winload.exe" program. I looked around on the internet
and figured out how to repair this using BCDEdit and set the correct paths. I
rebooted again and got the Vista boot loader to actually run, but Vista still
wouldn't boot. The problem was now loading cdrcdisk.sys which of course
halted the boot process. I figure this has to do with the fact that the
original workstation was installed on a SATA interface (which did not require
a custom driver -Dimension 4700) and the VM disk is an ATA interface. Others
on the internet suggested siabling USB devices but of course those options
aren't available in a VM BIOS.



Was JC Mackin just assuming this would work? Will Virtual PC allow a
emulated SATA mode in future versions? Others using VMWare were able to edit
the virtual hard disk directly and change the disk interface, but this isn't
possible with Virtual PC. Does this only work with XP installations?
Remember, I tried to capture a Vista installation.


----------TEXT FROM BOOK--------------
Real World

JC Mackin



"Before upgrading user's computers to a new operating system, I typically
spend some time with them locating their essential files so that I can back
up these files before the upgrade. However, users do occasionally forget
about important files stored in well-hidden locations, especially when they
are used to accessing this data automatically through an application. So, to
keep users happy after the upgrade, ideally, you should ensure that they have
a way of accessing everything on their old old systems. You can certainly
achieve this if you just backup their entire system in advance of the
upgrade, and sometimes this is indeed the best solution. But what I prefer to
do when I can is to back up only their user state and then replace the
system's hard disk, moving the old one to an external enclosure that can be
access directly if necessary.



Now however, there's an even cooler way to let users have access to their
old data. Microsoft's ImageX utility allows you to capture an image of the
user's old system and then deploy that image anywhere-even inside a virtual
machine. Users can then run the virtual machine in Virtual PC when they need
to access something that wasn't backup up or even when-why not?-they're just
feeling a little nostalgic for their old desktop


Any ideas?