Converting a Virtual Machine to a Physical Server (V2P)

Follow the steps as shown in previous section Restore a Disk: Copy a Virtual Disk to a Physical Disk (V2P) to copy the virtual disk contents to a physical disk.

Note: When converting a virtual machine’s virtual disk to a physical disk for the purposes of converting the VM into a physical server, try attaching the disk to an IDE controller first. Once Windows boots you can install any RAID drivers and other drivers the machine needs. Then attach to the other drive controller if necessary.

Note: Check your BIOS boot settings. You may need to switch off RAID and AHCI mode and switch to IDE in order to get the disk to boot on a physical machine.

In some cases it may be necessary to run the “Prepare Disk to Boot as VM” tool on the physical disk via the main menu Disk Tools->Prepare Disk to Boot as VM->select hard drive and click OK.

Helpful Hints: If the physical machine that you created from a virtual disk fails to boot and gives BSOD errors, try creating a dummy virtual machine in VMware Workstation/Player, VirtualBox, or Hyper-V with the physical disk attached to a virtual IDE controller. On older Windows versions this helps load safe mode where Windows will then update its own drivers properly. On newer versions of Windows (7 or Server 2008 and later) this is likely not necessary.  Also once in safe mode you can uninstall VMware tools or Hyper-V Integration Services, and you could install the hardware drivers supplied with your target motherboard if need be.

Tips to prevent BSOD when booting on new hardware

Another option once the physical disk is booted into a VM is to use the Windows utility sysprep with ‘generalize’ option to prepare Windows for new hardware (click reseal). You will find sysprep in the Windows CD, usually in the folder Support\Tools\deploy.cab. You could use 7-zip to extract all necessary files for sysprep out of the cab file.

On older Windows operating systems, such as XP or Windows Server 2003, you may need to install some basic out-of-the-box drivers in order to get Windows to boot again. A very helpful article is KB314082 (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/314082). Once you boot the VM from the physical disk, use the info provided in the article to place standard IDE drives back into the system:

Extract the Atapi.sys, Intelide.sys, Pciide.sys, and Pciidex.sys files from the %SystemRoot%\Driver Cache\I386\Driver.cab file, or copy the files to the %SystemRoot%\System32\Drivers folder.

In Microsoft Windows Explorer, right-click the Mergeide.reg file in the floppy drive, and then click
Merge. The reg file contents are available on the page linked above.

Then shutdown the VM and attach the disk directly to the target server’s IDE or SATA port.