Tag: VMWare

Convert IMG to VMDK.

by Muhammad Jawaid Shamshadin Technology, VirtualizationLeave a Comment on Convert IMG to VMDK.

I had an IMG image of our server which I wanted to mount on our virtual machine. Since I was using VMWare Player which supports VMDK so I was finding a way to mount IMG on a virtual machine or convert it to VMDK. I found the StarWind V2V Converter which made this easy. You can download it from here.

The whole process took only around 20-25 min where it converted about 10G of IMG file into VMDK. Cool!

I was then able to just create a new VM and add this VMDK there. Since it was bootable I was easily able to boot the VM and login.

You can use this tool to convert VMDK, VHD, and IMG to each other as well. A nice utility and on top of it, it is free.

Click here to read more about virtualization.

Installing Windows 8 Consumer Preview experience

by Muhammad Jawaid Shamshadin Microsoft, Technology, Virtualization, WindowsLeave a Comment on Installing Windows 8 Consumer Preview experience
The new Windows 8 Start Screen, making use of ...
Image via Wikipedia

Few months back Microsoft launched Windows 8 Developer Preview. Majority of people try to install beta or pre-launch versions on virtual machines. So did I, but there were lot of issues in installing Windows 8 Developer Preview and I posted a solution at http://mjawaid.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/windows-8-installation-error-hal_initialization_failed/.

On Feb 29 2012, Microsoft launched Windows 8 Consumer Preview. And again I tried to install it on a virtual machine and this time no errors 🙂 . While I was expecting some issues as there were issues before and this time Microsoft mentioned that installing on virtual machine could have problems so install on real system. But fortunately all things went fine and it seems Microsoft has improved a lot in this latest version. As I wasn’t really impressed with the developer preview, but consumer preview seems to be better.

I installed consumer preview using VMWare Player 4.0.2 build-591240 on a 64 bit machine. And I downloaded the 64-bit version of consumer preview. I am not sure if people trying on 32-bit are having issues. But I will try to install it on my home laptop. See how that goes?

Windows 8 installation error: HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED

by Muhammad Jawaid Shamshadin Microsoft, Technology, Windows2 Comments on Windows 8 installation error: HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED

I downloaded the Windows 8 Developer Preview from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/home/ and tried to install on Virtual PC, but got the following error.

Your PC ran in to a problem that it couldn’t handle,and now it needs to restart.

You can search for the error online: HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED

I also tried VMWare Player, but to no avail.

To fix this problem you need to use VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation 8.

Try these and you will be up and running Windows 8 Developer Preview 🙂

[Note: This post is about Windows Developer Preview. Microsoft has now launched Windows 8 Consumer Preview. You can see my post on it at http://mjawaid.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/windows-8-consumer-preview-2/]