I’ve just used the starter edition of VMware Converter to convert a pc to a virtual machine so as to free up the pc for another role.

The pc in question is a newish Dell with no PS/2 ports for connecting a keyboard and mouse, in place of the PS/2 ports there is a stack of USB ports. With a USB keyboard and mouse plugged in Windows XP detects and uses them with no bother, even the BIOS has no issues.

With no PS/2 port Windows XP doesn’t install the drivers for a PS/2 port, and with this being a special XP build (created by a college) it doesn’t have the drivers for the PS/2 on the disk. Bare this in mind.

Problem number one. Being a special build I couldn’t just point the converter at the pc, give it the administrator credentials and let it do the conversion. Something was blocking the process and I couldn’t figure it out. A local install of VMware Converter sorted the problem out and 2 hours later I had a 12G image of the pc on one of the servers.

Problem number two. After copying the image onto one of the virtual machine servers I connected to the server using the VMware Server Console, opened the image and booted it. After complaining about not being shutdown properly Windows XP was running and waiting for me to log in. “Success!” I thought, only to realise I couldn’t actually use the keyboard or the mouse.

Option number 2 was to remote desktop (using RDP) into the machine on it’s new IP address. “Connection Refused” was the response. In the end I changed the DHCP lease to give it the same address of the original pc and was then able to connnect. From there I could look in the hardware manager. Guess what. It had detected the PS/2 ports that VMware uses but couldn’t install the drivers since they weren’t on the disk. Fortunatly the install the of the VMware Tools installs it’s own keyboard and mouse drivers so after a quick install and a reboot I could use the keyboard and mouse from the VMware console.

Two lessons from this. First, “special” builds of Windows (any version) may cause you more problems down the line. Second, be aware of converting pc’s that don’t have a PS/2 port and then expecting it to work first time. I’m not the only one to come accross this problem.