Reverse Converter? Moving Virtualized Guest OS to Host OS

[MileHigh01]

I'm new to the forum and apologize if this has been covered before. I am also a novice with VMWare's tools so I may not be using the right terms. I have a virtualized desktop with XP as the OS. I need to make this the host OS -- the one that loads when the computer is turned on. Is this possible?

I tried running Acronis TrueImage in the guest OS to create an image. I then restored this to a newly formatted hard drive. I expected XP would boot and tell me that some of the hardware had changed. However, I see a fatal error shortly after the boot process starts.

Any ideas are appreciated.

Thanks!

[guyrleech · Accepted solution]

Is it a Stop 7B (INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE)? If it disappears too quickly then press F8 before booting starts and select to no automatically restart on error.

If it is a 7B, what is the disk controller for the boot disk on your physical box? It is probably missing some entries from "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase". It might work if you merge this key from a working physical XP on the same hardware. Would also need the drivers for the storage controller which you might be able to install in the VM before you image it out.

Also take a look at this:

http://www.vmware.com/support/v2p/index.html

[continuum]

Create a winbuilder LiveXP with OffLineSysprep - this will help adjusting the drivers

___________________________________

description of vmx-parameters:

VMware-liveCD:

[MileHigh01]

Thank you for the information. I found the document at useful. Further, sysprep was not necessary. I simply changed the harddrive device controllers to generic devices, imaged the system, and restored it to a phyisical computer.