Further to my previous post regarding getting VMWare Server up and running on Vista I spent a while over the weekend trying to migrate a Virtual PC image.
VMWare kindly provides a tool to carry out the conversion called VMWare Convertor. My first attempt was met with a message: “Unable to Determine Guest Operating System”. I had a root around for logs or an entry in the Event Viewer to shed more light but there was nothing to be found. However, help was at hand on the ‘net suggesting that an install of MS XML 4 might resolve the issue (details here). I also moved the files to my local machine (they had been on a server) and retried and this time the conversion was successful.
The next issue came when I tried to start the image that I had created and I got a message about not being able to initialize the image. This time there were lots of red errors in the Event log stating “Could not reset ‘__vmware_user__’ password”. For some reason the local VMWare user and group had disappeared, perhaps when the convertor was install? Again a search on the web pointed to a solution, which is repeated below. I would like to the original but it seems to contain a large amount of porn links.
Run this from the command line:
control userpasswords2
Add the group __vmware__ and the user __vmware_user__ as described here: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/ws32_troubleshooting.pdf
I only needed to add the group, user, and assign the user to the group. I did not need to carry out the section on the local security policy. Finally run ‘services’ and start all of the services that start with VMWare. Then connect using VMWare console and you should be good to go.