Lewis' Blog Tales from the trenches of information technology

Migrating a bare-metal Windows 2000 install to a VirtualBox guest

A client's sole remaining W2K box started having boot issues the other day. It had been on the slate for about a year (or two or three) for an upgrade, but somehow, it just kept chugging along, so we left it be. Well, after confirming that the drive hardware (80GB Western Digital SATA) was in good shape (I did this from a Parted Magic USB stick boot, running just some rudimentary SMART diagnostics), and yet still unable to get W2K to move beyond the first graphical screen during startup, we decided that the time had come for a change.