Help: Booting Hard Drives In A Different Machine

[mcwillzz]

**This is not simple data recovery, the disks need to be bootable in some form in order to be accessed the same way as the original users.

 

I have 5 hard drives pulled from different machines, 4 loaded with Windows XP or above. These are clones of the original drives. The fifth drive was a backup drive in the fourth machine.

 

I thought the best way to go about booting these, would be to build a new machine, install them all, and boot the physical disks into VM's. I found out this is difficult, and risks data loss if done wrong. I should have done prior research (whoops).

 

My next option was to boot the drives individually, and create a VDI of each drive, which I could then boot inside of a VM. However, none of the drives will boot in the PC I built, they immediately BSOD. (Even with attempts to boot into Safe Mode.) I am assuming this is driver related. ((Can I convert the entire disk into a VDI without booting directly into it?)*note the password issue at bottom as well.)

 

I can view the root directory of all the drives when I boot to my "host" drive, which is a new drive with a fresh install of Windows 10.

 

I need to physically boot the drives for my client to be able to access them in the same way as they would have been before the drives were pulled. The previous machines are not physically available. Also, once all the drives are bootable (physically or as a VM), I will need to remove any login passwords so he can access the OS, programs, files, etc. unhindered.

 

((Physically booting each drive individually is an option, but once I get them to boot I might as well convert them to VDI's anyway))

 

Any help, or recommendations on where to get help, would be greatly appreciated!

Edited April 27, 2017 by mcwillzz

[loadedmind]

Honestly, your best bet is to take data from all drives and select what data you need to restore. Put that information in a centralized location. Pull said data back onto freshly built machine and call it a day. From there, you can use something like VMware's Standalone Converter to convert if needed either individually or the aggregate of all machines in question. The OS is expecting certain hardware from the previous physical machines to boot. It doesn't see it. So it freaks out.