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@fth0 Thanks for your continued support.

I think it is time to put this ambition to bed. It has occupied far too much of my time already. And, as they say, when it rains it pours. I have another issue that I will post on after this related to a separate VM.

This is quite puzzling to me, as a professional software developer for 40+ years, that such a common task for virtualization would seem to have so many hurdles and no straightforward answers. If anyone can point me in a different direction such as a 3rd party company that gets paid to make difficult VMs work, it would be appreciated. If the cost were not too much, I would certainly consider it.

Thanks again to all for your time and effort. I often do the same thing for developers on the Stackoverflow platform; I find that I learn as much as I help by just helping others to understand complex problems that are in my areas of expertise. And I enjoy the positive karma that I receive when helping others solve their problems.

Usually P2V with compatible OS's like 7 works well, especially if the original drive contains everything needed on that one drive. But if the various boot mechanisms are spread around in unusual patterns(*), or get deleted, things get a bit hairy.

* example, I recently tried an experimental extra install of Windows 10 on my existing Windows 10 workstation (all physical installs, not VMs, btw). I did the experimental install on another drive, intending to use the PC's BIOS boot menu to choose the boot drive. But I did not remove the existing drive from the PC, so Windows unexpectedly decided to merge the new install into the existing install's boot loader, leaving no boot loader on the new drive's install. That new install's disk could not successfully be P2V'd.

Maybe your drive had a boot loader on a different drive, per fth0's observations above? Or maybe that partition delete killed something that the partition restore didn't fully restore. Or the lack of a Windows repair install post-P2V. Any of these would deep-six an easy P2V.

Thanks for the kind words, much appreciated.

JJJones wrote:I find that I learn as much as I help by just helping others to understand complex problems that are in my areas of expertise.

We're a bit alike: I mostly engage in the more complex problems to learn even more (and to simultaneously spread my knowledge).

JJJones wrote:This is quite puzzling to me, as a professional software developer for 40+ years, that such a common task for virtualization would seem to have so many hurdles and no straightforward answers.

As an educated guess, I think (but could be wrong) that Dell tried to prevent their customers from leaving their ecosystem, by locking their hard disks to the computer. This could be done via the BIOS, via a proprietary boot loader located within any of the 3* 63 sectors or within the Dell OEM partition I mentioned in my previous post. In your case, even a third party (the company transplanting the original hard drives) was involved, potentially complicating things.

Therefore, I'd prefer to analyze the whole bootstrapping procedure myself. One of my preferred resources with very detailed background information about booting PCs is The Starman's Realm. In the distant past (198x), I've analyzed MBRs and VBRs myself.

JJJones wrote:If anyone can point me in a different direction such as a 3rd party company that gets paid to make difficult VMs work, it would be appreciated. If the cost were not too much, I would certainly consider it.

I cannot recommend a 3rd party company. I'm also not interested in money; my scarce resource rather is time. If you're not in a hurry, we could slowly proceed here ...

fth0 wrote:As an educated guess, I think (but could be wrong) that Dell tried to prevent their customers from leaving their ecosystem, by locking their hard disks to the computer.

This has been mentioned before. However, it would seem to me that if this were true, these forums and the internet would be loaded with such issues concerning VMs on Dell devices. But I cannot find any evidence of this. So, it would seem unlikely to me.

fth0 wrote:If you're not in a hurry, we could slowly proceed here ...

I will be happy to continue. If you, or anyone else, has anything I should try, use, test; just let me know and I will be happy to give it a try. With my limited experience here (but quickly growing) I don't have a next step in mind. This isn't exactly rocket-science and it has to be possible to fix, we just have to find the right resources to keep plodding forward.

JJJones wrote:I will be happy to continue.

Ok. I'll try to lead you with "small" steps. This means that the steps are small in respect to the way to the finish line, not that they are simple. Please don't hesitate to ask if you need more detailed help.

A) The first goal is to understand how the boot sequence of the original disks worked.

B) The second goal is to create/modify a similar virtual hard disk image.

A1) The 1st step is to select and install a disk editor software on your Windows host. I haven't used one on Windows in the past 25 years or so, but Active@ Disk Editor looks promising.

A2) The 2nd step is to use this software to copy the 1st sector (MBR) from each of the two original disks to a file and provide the files. This will enable me to identify and understand both MBR codes and partition tables, and to decide which disk sectors to request next.

Edit:
Regarding A1: Active@ Disk Editor doesn't seem to provide a straight forward method to save any disk content to a file. You could only prepare a file of sufficient size before starting the disk editor and later overwrite its contents from within the disk editor, which could account as "best abuse of functionality".

Perhaps HxD is a better choice. Some non-obvious menu hints for inside HxD: Extras > Open disk...; Edit > Select block...; File > Save selection....

@fth0

I did use ActiveDiskEditor (ADE). It seems to be a fine tool. And since you are helping me with this, I decided to do some reading last night to give me a better understanding of disk structure, MBRs, Partitions, etc. from this site: https://www.ntfs.com/hard-disk-basics.htm
I now have a better understanding of terminology and importance and hopefully can perform your requests without too many questions.

I found no problem using ADE to get what you asked for.

Attached is the MBR (1st sector) of each of my two Win7 1TB SATA drives, now residing in my new Win11 computer. ADE has a nice 'Copy Formatted' command that gives a standard hexadecimal layout which is what I assume you expect. But let me know if you need this differently.

@fth0
I found this interesting, but it may well mean nothing.

Below is a picture of how ADE (ActiveDiskEditor) sees my computer and the two disk drives in question.

Interesting that the DellUtility partition has an Exclamation icon next to it and some files on the right in RED.
Also, worth noting, that the partition I removed and then recovered afterwards was the RECOVERY (E:) partition. Not this DellUtility partition.

fyi

scottgus1 wrote:Microsoft used to allow downloading an ISO of Windows 7 if you entered your product key. That ended literally 6 days ago...

Well, it *sorta* did, but also sorta not.

I discovered yesterday (ffs!) that I'm going to need to update the BIOS on a friend's Dell: a process that requires a *32-bit* version of Windows , which is not something many of us have kept around for the last decade.
Meanwhile, MS has not only pulled the page you're talking about, they've also been bullying websites into removing links to it, and especially any links to the *actual* ISO downloads that that braindead page was gating. Since I'm not a big fan of Russian torrents with preloaded malware I figured I was SOL, but then I thought to myself "y'know, I bet the ISOs are all just sitting on the servers still", and that the Wayback Machine exists...

No link, for obvious reasons, but it turns out I was right.
The files will get cleaned up eventually, but for anyone who missed their chance before, the window is still open.

fth0 wrote:As an educated guess, I think (but could be wrong) that Dell tried to prevent their customers from leaving their ecosystem, by locking their hard disks to the computer.

Since I know how your curiosity is...

What that partition's mostly for is *re-imaging* the drive, because of Windows' tendency to acquire malware (and degrade over time even in in the absence of that, but mostly malware). That's why it's so large: it's basically the install media complete with drivers for all the HW. (I suspect "... of every configuration of every model that Dell ships with that particular flavor of Windows). Possibly even with the activation key in embedded in there - I can't remember.

Anyway: back when SSDs were $10/GB and 60GB max, it was a substantial percentage of the disk and a complete waste of space in a corporate environment, so we would nuke it when cloning HDDs to SSD replacements. And, as they say, "nothing of value was lost". There's almost certainly UEFI garbage in there these days too, but wouldn't have been in the W7 era (and wouldn't matter anyway in a VM).

I'm roughly with Scott: outside of academic curiosity, the "best" approach here is to just try to repair it with a W7 ISO. Personally though, I'd be a lot more inclined to do a clean W7 install instead, then mount the old drive and copy anything important off it. I like solving puzzles as much as anyone, but usually I have more important things to do. If you want to try anyway though, gl.

JJJones wrote:Attached is the MBR (1st sector) of each of my two Win7 1TB SATA drives

The MBR of the OS drive is not a Windows 7 MBR, but a Windows Vista MBR. The differences are not important here, but it tells me that the hard disk probably was initially setup for Windows Vista (perhaps only during manufacturing at Dell). The partition table matches what you showed in your previous posts. None of the 3 partitions is marked as active (bootable). In consequence, if you'd put this hard disk into another PC, booting from it would always lead to the INT 18h error you've seen already.

From the Datapart1 drive, you didn't provide the MBR, but the (NTFS) VBR. In ADE, did you perhaps open "DATAPART1" instead of "PhysicalDrive0"? If I guessed right, please try again after reading the next paragraph.

JJJones wrote:ADE has a nice 'Copy Formatted' command that gives a standard hexadecimal layout which is what I assume you expect. But let me know if you need this differently.

Regarding the MBRs, this was sufficient, because I only compared them visually with the hexdumps in the Starman websites. But if I wanted to analyze the contents myself with ADE (or with another software), I'd have to convert them back to the binary data first. Perhaps you can try the following next time: Prepare a (text) file with at least 512 characters. In ADE, you can open multiple tabs simultaneously, so open the disk to analyze and the (text) file, and copy the sector content from the disk to the file, thereby overwriting the file's contents.

Regarding the exclamation mark icons in ADE, they probably indicate "hidden" partitions, which also have no driver letter assigned to them. A similar property applies to the files shown in red. The DellUtility partition has partition type 0xDE == 11011110b, and the red colored bit is the "hidden" bit.

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arQon wrote:What that partition's mostly for is *re-imaging* the drive, because of Windows' tendency to acquire malware (and degrade over time even in in the absence of that, but mostly malware). That's why it's so large

Are you talking about the small DellUtlity partition (~39 MB), or the large RECOVERY partition (~14 GB), or both? The former is the questionable one ...

arQon wrote:I'm roughly with Scott: outside of academic curiosity, the "best" approach here is to just try to repair it with a W7 ISO.

I'm also with you on that. Especially, since it can be tried several times inside the VM, without endangering the original hard disks. The original RECOVERY probably is no third option, because it usually destroys the user's contents.

@fth0 You are correct. I must have mistakenly sent a partition instead of Physical Drive 0. Now attached.

I am afraid I could not understand nor follow your instructions for how to give you the data differently. Were you wanting binary (100011100101) instead of hex (33C0)? If yes, then I could not find any way in ADE to export or view this data in any format other than Hex (ADE refers to this as Binary), Ascii, or Unicode. Those appear to be the only options. Let me know if I am missing the entire point here please.

It seems that finding a valid Win7 Pro ISO would be a quicker solution to this problem. One issue I have is that I have no idea what my Win7 License Key was or how to find it.

Anyway... standing by for further instructions. Take care and have a great day.

p.s. to everyone else, thanks for the input and info, but it appears there are no questions or actions being requested of me in order to respond. But let me know if I missed any.

Ok, the MBR of "PhysicalDrive0" is a Windows 7 MBR. The partition table has only one entry, and it's not marked as active (bootable). In consequence, both original hard disks currently do not have any bootable partition.

We've already tried marking the OS partition as bootable inside the VM without complete success. As alternatives, we could try different ideas next:

A3) Boot the VM with the GParted ISO, remove the boot flag from the OS partition, and add the boot flag to the Dell partition. Start the VM from the virtual hard disk, and find out what the Dell partition is all about.

A4) Provide the 1st 16 sectors of the original hard disk, using the following procedure: Unzip the 8k-stars.zip file attached to this post. In ADE, open the 8k-stars.txt file, select Edit > Allow Edit Content to make it writable, go to the My Computer tab, open the "PhysicalDrive1" MBR, mark the contents from Offset 0 to Offset 8191, press Ctrl-C to copy, select the tab with the 8k-stars.txt file, press Ctrl-V to paste, and use the Save button to write the changes to the file. With the copied information in the 8k-stars.txt file, I'd like to see if there is any hidden boot loader inside those sectors.

A5) Provide the 1st 16 sectors of the OS partition of the original hard disk. If you managed A4 above, this will be quite easy (don't forget to duplicate the 8k-stars.txt file ).

JJJones wrote:It seems that finding a valid Win7 Pro ISO would be a quicker solution to this problem. One issue I have is that I have no idea what my Win7 License Key was or how to find it.

I'd agree with that. Don't let me keep you from following that strategy. For tests with the VM, you perhaps don't need a license key. And if the tests are successful, you can buy a cheap license key afterwards.

fth0 wrote:Are you talking about the small DellUtlity partition (~39 MB), or the large RECOVERY partition (~14 GB), or both? The former is the questionable one ...

The larger one. I can't remember what the "Utility" partition actually held, just that it was irrelevant.

Updates:

• I want to rebuild the VHD from scratch again using a recommended method. There have been so many builds here I am not sure how I built my latest VHD. How best to build the VHD (or which format) from my hard drive? If using Disk2VHD, do I check the option for "Prepare for use in Virtual PC" or not?

• I am now in possession of a Win7Pro ISO file (4GB). I am quite confused on how to proceed with that. Can anyone give a quick step-by-step in my case? Correct me if I am wrong, but now that I am in possession of this ISO, it would seem that we should eliminate this first as a possible solution. As per the previous bullet, is there a preferred way to build the VHD for this process?

• @fth0 - I can certainly do what you ask in "A3)" above. But it feels like I should try the Win7 ISO first.

• @fth0 - Steps A4 and A5 will be attempted if all else fails above.

I second your thoughts, and I have no objections.

But I'll have to leave your questions for others to answer. I hope @mpack and/or @scottgus1 are still following this thread ...