So I was teaching a cut down version of our Essential BizTalk course last week and one thing I was talking about struck me as making a good blog post (to follow shortly). So I cranked up my BizTalk virtual machine and realised I hadn't run it on this computer before as it discovered lots of new hardware.

I noticed that I also hadn't yet installed the VMWare Tools so I installed them and rebooted. At that point I remembered why i hadn't installed the VMWare Tools. this was a VPC image that I had converted that had the VPC Additions installed and the two don't play nice together.

I found myself at the CTRL-ALT-DEL screen with the image refusing to recognize any input such as CTRL-ALT-INS or using the menu to send the CTRL-ALT-DEL to the virtual machine.

I decided to reboot into safe mode and uninstall the VMWare Tools - no dice - still no input accepted. At this point I was faced with having to rebuild my image from scratch (stupidly I'd never taken a snapshot so I had nothing to recover to).

Then I remembered that the VMWare conversion was non-destructive, so I deleted all the VMWare bits of the image and left myself with the .vmc and .vhd files. This time when I re-added the image it re-converted and I got back to my starting point ... I immediately took a snapshot this time.

I keep on being reminded why I like VMWare so much.