We have a computer that has failed, the hard drive inside is fine and has an application on there that we cannot install onto another machine (no install disks). We would like to make an image of this machine and then boot it in VMWare. So far we have failed to do this. I know how to do this for a machine that is running, but just cannot do it for the computer after we have removed its hard disk. Anyone have some advice please?
You will have to get access to the disk somehow. What kind of a hard drive is that? Is it IDE or SATA? The best option would be to find a spare computer to attach the hard drive to and then make a backup image as usual. If you have Paragon Professional, you can make a VMWare image straight away using "P2V copy" wizard and picking the OS to migrate. Paragon might be able to adjust the OS so it works in a virtual machine out-of-the-box. If you do not have Paragon Professional, then just make a copy of the drive as usual, and then make Paragon bootable ISO in Recovery Media builder, which you can use to boot VMWare. After you have booted it, you can connect to network share where the hard drive image is stored and then Restore the image onto virtual machine disk. Of course, there is no guarantee that the OS will boot in the virtual machine. Most common problems after migrating Windows OS is wrong boot record and HAL - both problems usually can be fixed with correct virtual machine configuration and Windows Recovery console tools. Also, Windows licence might become deactivated after such dramatic hardware changes. But I'm just assuming here, and maybe you don't have Windows on that hard drive, in that case ignore what I said about HAL and boot record.
