Converting a Windows 2000 Physical Machine to a Virtual Machine

I've done this once, long time ago. The biggest pain was installing the correct drivers for the (virtual) hard disk. You must do it while this Windows installation still can boot on hardware.

If your hardware uses AHCI, and your virtual machine uses ATA, you're in trouble, you need to convert your Windows to ATA mode before you move to virtual. Google is full of recipes for this, but I cannot recommend any, since none worked for me.

So my advise is, make a copy of the disk, make sure you keep your original machine intact in case you need to reconfigure it again, install all needed drivers and try to boot in VMWare. Your success is very much dependent on your current hardware configuration.

Just did this. Installed VMware vCenter Converter Standalone (v 4.0.1) on the local Windows 2000 server which has SP4 and SP4 rollup installed. Had to reboot the server. Started converter and used the local admin creds. Remember to point the destination at a host, I made the mistake of pointing it at the vCenter server.