As mentioned in my other thread, hot cloning results in NTFS file system corruption and a disk check on first boot of the migrated server that always has to delete a bad attribute record in the $J. So it is not hot cloning NTFS correctly no matter what I do.
Since it appears I cannot do WinPE conversion, I am going to have to do the next step down the rung for offline cold cloning.
File Server: Dell PowerEdge 2900
- Two RAID-5, one OS boot 73g x2, one data drive 300g x4
- Running Server 2008 R2 SP1
Install VMWare Tools on Server 2008, to preinstall VM drivers.
Insert another spare SAS hard drive
- in controller, configure as RAID-0
- in controller, set this as boot drive
Install basic Windows 7 DVD on this drive
Install Standalone Converter on Windows 7
Clone to VMWare ESXi 5.5
In cloned machine
- Delete the Windows 7 VMDK
- Configure migrated VM settings manually
Boot from the original Server 2008 R2 disk, which has not been twiddled by Converter but copied raw to the VMDK.