Moved a VM from one PC to another and now it will not boot

[rob_chafer]

I moved a Windows 7 VM from my main PC to my laptop as I am going away for a while. The VM blue screens and running in Safe mode it stops as classpnp.sys. I have seen other people make reference to this but seemingly with little success. Both my main PC and laptop are Win 7 x64 and I am running the latest Vbox (4.2.12). I still have access to both hosts -- is there anything I can do to get the VM running on my laptop?

[mpack]

See Minimum information needed for assistance.

Also please describe in detail how you moved the VM.

[rob_chafer]

Hi mpack

Aha -- I had just copied the .vmdk file and assumed it would work. You comment about 'how I moved the VM' got me thinking I should use the export/import procedure. That works just swimmingly and now the VM works. Thank you for you help!

Why didn't it work previously? Was it a chipset mismatch between the VM and what vbox decided to give it by default?

[mpack]

Why didn't it work previously?

When you say that you just copied the VMDK... I assume you mounted that VMDK in a new VM. In which case my guess is that your new VM recipe was not a good enough match for the old one. Windows can be fussy in a number of ways, so I wouldn't like to speculate about exactly what it was. Import/Export mostly ensures that won't be a problem, though I prefer the more low tech route of copying the VM folder (with all contents), and registering the .vbox file on the target PC using Machine|Add.