P2V dramas with Virtual PC and NTBackup

I've been following the instructions in this discussion group posting with the exception that I'm using Virtual PC.

Installing a vanilla os on to a vpc is obviously no big deal. But it got harder sooner than I would have liked - restoring the bkf file. I have hit the following problems:

I couldn't restore from a a shared folder due to known issues.

I tried to copy the bkf file from a shared folder to the guest c drive but I kept getting a device i/o error. It appears that the host needs to have almost as much memory available as the size of the file being copied. Obviously this is problematic for bkf files that can be in the multi gigabyte range.

I then split the bkf file into multiple parts with winzip and minimised the amount of guest memory to maximise the chances of the copy completing successfully.

Finally I could restore the bkf file!

However when I restarted, I got an error box at the login screen as follows:

Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 program

C:\Prog...

This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way. Please contact the application's support team for more information.

Annoyingly this error box was right in front of the login box and I couldn't move the error box or close it (the mouse stopped working).

I tried entering login credentials blind without success (couldn't see what domain was selected and couldn't see the contents of any dialog boxes that popped up).

Finally I rebooted the image in the hope the error or the mouse failure would go away but I got a boot error on a black screen instead:

Windows could not start because of an error in the software.
Please report this problem as :
load needed DLLs for HAL.
Please contact your support person to report this problem.

Aha! Here was something referred to in the instructions. I booted from the Win2K3 CD and went to the recovery console to replace the hal file but found that it wouldn't take the current administrator password.

It turns out that the recovery console admin password will be the one used when Win2K3 was initially installed, and subsequent password changes don't affect this. I don't have that password and had to use http://www.loginrecovery.com/ to get the password back.

While I was waiting 48 hours (to get the password for free) I impatiently tried to repair the server using the Win2K3 CD to see if that would sort things out.

A required file called cpqteam.hlp could not be found. Who requires a help file?? Cancelled.

The next one was a bit tougher to figure out: install.exe. The default path on the c drive was c:\windows\microsoft.net\v2.0.50727\Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0. So I downloaded dotnetfx.exe, extracted the files, converted them to iso, captured the image as a cd and selected the file.

The repair chugged on a bit further and then crashed dramatically with stop error 0x000000CE DRIVER_UNLOADED_WITHOUT_CANCELLING_PENDING_OPERATIONS for file intelppm.sys.

Virtual PC Guy reckons I should disable the driver in the registry but with a non booting guest and no access to recovery console (at least until I hear from loginrecovery) I think I've hit the wall...