Creation of Virtual Machine fails using 'VMWare vCenter Convertor Standalone'

Question

I am trying to convert my Bootcamped Windows 7 partition to a VM using VMWare's vCenter software. The idea being to move the VM to an external drive and reclaim the bootcamp partition.

The conversion progresses till 98% and fails with two warning and one error message

Warning 1: Unable to update boot.ini on the destination machine's system volume.
Warning 2: Unable to update drive letters for the destination volume layout
Error : An error occurred during reconfiguration

I tried thrice but no avail. Any help is appreciated.

Other bits of information that might be relevant:

1. I tried to load the bootcamped partition directly from OSX using VMWare Fusion 3 and it failed. Goes into an infinite loop of 'Starting Windows'->'BSOD'->Repeat. This was before I made my first attempt at using the converter.

2. When initiating the conversion VMWare shows three available partition, one is the BOOTCAMPED partition, other is the OSX partition and third one is a mysterious 200 Mb partition that isn't visible anywhere else.

I really don't want to build my Windows 7 machine from scratch again, but if this doesn't work I'll have to do so.

Answer 1

I attempted to use vCenter software because I was unable to load my bootcamped partition directly from OSX using VMWare. As stated above I was getting the error I mentioned in point 1 above.

I was able to resolve that error by applying a registry patch in my bootcamped Windows 7.

VMWare is now able to load the bootcamped partition and so now I can use the existing partition as well. So I would say don't try to use vCenter instead refer to this thread on VMWare support if you get BSODs trying to load bootcamped partition on VMWare.