For almost a year now, I’ve been using VMware’s Converter in a most useful way at work: As employees move on to other pastures I use Converter to make a virtual machine “image” of their desktop. That way, if it turns out they left something on their machine that was important it isn’t lost forever when I subsequently re-format and image the desktop for the next user.
This has actually saved us some grief a few times now. Nothing major, but I was sure happy I had the VM copy available.
Hit a snag with one of our newer machines yesterday though.
See, until recently, our machines came with no OS or XP Home. First thing we’d do is install our Enterprise edition of XP Pro.
(yes, I realize my VMware imaging is “stretching” my license counts… but c’mon, these aren’t productive or even used machines! And besides, keep reading…)
Our more recent machines came with XP Pro already installed so I just de-crapped ‘em and turned ‘em loose. This week was the first time I needed to “retire” an active image on one.
After running VMware Converter against it, I brought it up in VMware Player to install the extensions and was greeted with this message after logging in:
Uh oh, too many hardware changes detected!
I clicked “Yes” and spent over an hour looking at:
Nuts.
I know there’s connectivity to it, but it just ain’t happy. Apparently the Enterprise version of XP is a bit more lenient about such things…
Plan B
Reckon I’ll just start using DriveImage XML to make drive images instead. Clears any compliancy issues and accomplishes almost the exact same thing — just not quite as simple to boot an image. But it sure is easy to browse and image and retrieve files.
(I’ve mentioned DriveImage XML in the past — It’s slick!)
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April 8th, 2008 
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Wow, never seen this before and I’ve been activating the same copy of Windows XP over and over for a couple years now
The Enterprise(I’m assuming you mean VLK variant?) version of XP doesn’t need activation at all. I always make sure to reimage any machine with a VLK install if at all possible just to get rid of this limitation.
@Peter – on different hardware each time?
@Dave – exactly — VLK. Thanks for that correction. My new M.O. is to do just what you said. Image the new ones first, even if they came with XP Pro.
@Chris – yes, different hardware each time and on a variety of VM images. It is an ISO from MSDN volume licensing subscription, perhaps that has something to do with it?
@Peter – yep, that would explain it.
@Peter – If its VLK there is no activation involved…its just putting in the VLK during Mini-Setup or Windows Welcome but that doesn’t check in with MS for activation.