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[wildweaselmi]

People tired of having to buy a Windows workstation every couple of years when there PC dies gets annoying.

Eventually I help them move to a Mac and transfer there dead PC to a VMWare Fusion session on there Mac so they don't loose anything but dead weight (there Windows PC).

Many of the PC's (laptops or desktops) have hardware failure and most of the time it isn't the hardddrive that fails, its the power supply, mother board, or a multitude of other reasons. If the harddrive is still okay I attach a ide to usb adapter and plug into a PeeCee.

First I press F12 to bring up the boot menu so I can select USB versus CD or Internal Harddrive.

Second, I press F8 so I can select Safe Mode so I can avoid the retarded Windows Blue Screen of Death.

Third, I install VMware Converter and convert the drive to a VMWare Fusion session.

Fourth, I copy the VMware files to an external drive formatted in FAT (which is readable and writeable from windows and mac)

Fifth, plug the harddrive into there new Mac and copy the VMWare files over.

Sixth, in VMWare click file-open

Attached Files

•  migrating_physical_pc_to_fusion.pdf   650.16K   0 downloads

[wildweaselmi]

Discovered on some Dell's that you have to boot off the actual hardware to get a good image.

You can recover the data from your old machine by using your old hard drive as an external drive but not all of these will boot up because of driver issues.

Something I haven't tried is attempt to wipe the hardset drivers on the old drive (after I got everything off it that the customer wanted me to retrieve).

REPAIR the operating system (possibly even overwrite it without formatting which is just reinstalling the operating system.)