Thanks for your answer COS,
I did create a full backup image of the disk (apart from the manufacturer's restore partition and the partition I'm saving the image to - you can see that in one of the attachments on my first post) and tried restore the entire image onto a VM, then run VMware Converter and do a "Reconfigure" on that VM, but as I said, the same error "Unable to find system volume" keeps popping out.
Yes, I am aware of the Windows OEM policy, but I hope I'll be able to use that VM for browser testing purposes so I'm not concerned about the activation Nagware.
To be honest I am in no desperate need of having a Win8 VM as I want to get rid of Win8 and install Win7 on this notebook, but since I paid the OEM license I think it would be a shame to just discard a Win8 OS without at least trying to create a VM first.
But if I keep having these problems I might as well do that and buy a new license in the future when needed.
Now I would like to ask you the same questions I asked POCEH:
Is there something wrong with my physical host's BCD according to you (see the attachment in my first post)?
Can I modify the BCD and re-run the P2V process after backing up the original BCD?
Thanks,
best regards.