Hi, this isn't a question, but just a post that may help someone who is trying to do what I've been doing the last 24 hours. What follows is a detailed journey of my quest to create a VMware virtual machine from a virtual machine originally created using Microsoft Virtual PC 2007.
Why did I want to convert? Because the guest machine in VPC 2007 has a problem with audio sound: it stutters and skips so badly, that any audio track is unlistenable. That is an admitted problem for some VPC virtual machines, especially when they run on laptops, and most especially when those laptops are new and running sophisticated power management techniques. Hitting a brick wall with the sound problem on my VPC virtual machine, my quest was to see if VMware's virtual machine would have the same problem with sound (note: my host machine's sound is fine, so I knew I wasn't dealing with a hardware issue or another issue with the host system's audio subsystem).
The hardware: I'm running a Vista Ultimate host using a new (Oct '07) Dell 1520 laptop: 2Ghz CPU, 2Gb of RAM, 120Gb/7200rpms harddrive. All patches are up-to-date for software and drivers, including the audio driver. Note that this 1520 has very sophisticated power management options -- far more than I've ever seen before. I created a special power scheme that keeps the CPU running a peak speed, but dims the screen and turns off the harddrive after a period of inactivity. I haven't tested running a virtual machine with pared down CPU speed.
I also used Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 to create a guest machine running Windows XP Home Edition, which is the virtual machine I'm referring to in this thread. The virtual machine runs with 512mb of RAM and there is plenty of disk space available both on the host and guest machines.
To begin with, I thought I would simply load VMware Player v2.0.2 onto my Vista host and import the VPC 2007 WinXP virtual machine -- VMware says that this is supposed to work. It doesn't (at least for me). During the import (you simply point to the VPC configuration file on the host's file system to perform the import, looking for the .vmc filetype), VMware Player abruptly aborted the process with an error message that said the import failed, and nothing much more than that. Tried again, got the same error. Going into the Event log in Vista, I found the following application error log entries:
Vmount2.Vmount2Device: no drive letter currently assigned
Vmount2.Vmount2Service: VmountCopyFile failed with error 124
Unhelpful, to say the least. So I hit Google to look for answers, didn't find any, checked VMware's website, no help there, but then found some guy's workaround solution: install VMware Converter (free, like VMware Player) on the VPC virtual machine, then use VMWare Converter to create a VMware virtual machine out of the VPC virtual machine. What's odd is that you're telling Converter to convert a "physical machine" into a virtual machine, but what you're really doing is creating a VMware Virtual Machine from a Microsoft VPC 2007 virtual machine!
I loaded Converter (version 3) onto my VPC virtual machine and ran it. I learned that creating a virtual image using VMware tools is more complicated than with Microsoft (lots of settings from which to choose), but I navigated the process okay (note: you are importing a standalone virtual machine using Converter running inside the VPC virtual machine, which to me is counter-intuitive because it seems like I'm exporting an image, not importing one). I had some difficulty getting the VMware virtual image to save onto my host machine's file system, so initially I saved to the virtual machine's hard drive, but had difficulty moving it from there onto the host machine's file system. The short answer here is to use Microsoft Loopback Adapter on the Vista host, point the VPC virtual machine to use that network device, and you've got a host-to-virtual network (note: simply doing a drag-and-drop between guest and host didn't work for me, as the copy repeatedly aborted after a gig of data movement).
Okay, eventually I've got a VMware virtual machine on my Vista host file system. NOW I can use VMware Player to import a VMware virtual machine.
That part worked, but again, not without problems. Firstly, the import process loads a lot of new drivers onto the virtual machine so that Windows complains that too much has changed, and I now need to reactivate Windows. Secondly, the screen resolution was auto-changed by Windows and, upon the 2nd reboot, locked up that time and every other reboot attempt, so that I had to start from scratch using a VPC virtual machine running 800x600 screen resolution so the VMware virtual machine I created wouldn't balk at the screen resolution. Thirdly, and very importantly, the VMware mouse driver doesn't work in the VMWare virtual machine. It's a version 12 driver from April '07, but it only allows the mouse pointer to move, but clicking on the mouse raises no event, so you can't click or double-click with the mouse (I'm actually using the laptop's touchpad here).
To get around this problem, I figure out how to use keyboard keys to navigate on the screen, to open the Control Panel, to open the Mouse icon (in Classic view), to get to the Hardware tab, to depress the Properties button, to get to the Driver tab, to Rollback the driver (to the VPC machine's 2001 basic Microsoft mouse driver). After restarting, my mouse works okay! Yea!!
So, now I've got a Vista Ultimate host running VMware Player v2.0.2, which is running a guest WinXP Home Edition originally created with Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, then converted to a VMware machine using VMware Converter v3, then imported into VMware Player v2.0.2 running on the Vista host, with the VMware mouse driver stripped away and the Windows Home Edition clock ticking before I must reactivate the operating system.
But ... what about the SOUND??? I did all this just to test out the sound under VMware. Was it worth it?
YES!!!!
The audio tracks that stuttered and spat and skipped in VPC 2007 play smoothly and perfectly under VMware Player. Mouse performance (using Microsoft's generic mouse driver) is responsive and works fine. Full screen operation on the guest machine is fine.
I haven't tried the USB features available under VMware yet. Until I need to, I'll leave well enough alone, since getting good sound out of my virtual machine is what I was after.
I hope this loooong thread might help / encourage someone else with similar aspirations for running an XP virtual machine under a Vista host using a laptop with sophisticated power management software.
