I've spent the last week trying to get a cloned win98se PC->VM to work.
While I can get it to boot in safe mode, I cannot get it to boot normally unless I remove some drivers, namely those that are related to the harddrive and cdrom.
I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out what the issue is.
If i install a fresh windows 98 se into a VM it works fine. Comparing the fresh install to the cloned vm, I can see some differences. One of the differences is in the BIOS it shows Primary Master as [VMWare Virtual IDE Hard-(PM)] and Primary Slave as [VMWare Virtual IDE CDROM-(PM)].
However, in the cloned VM, in the BIOS it shows Primary Master as [VMWare Virtual IDE Hard-(PM)], and Secondary Master as [VMWare Virtual IDE CDROM-(PM)], but Primary and Secondary Slave as [NONE].
So in other words, in the fresh install, the hard drive is seen as Primary Master, and the CDROM is seen as Primary Slave, but in the cloned VM, it thinks the CDROM is the secondary master instead of the primary slave. These are on the same host machine, so I don't understand why there would be any difference at all.
I'm wondering if this little difference is behind (some of) the issues I am having with the cloned VM?
Getting past the BIOS, if I get the cloned VM to boot in safe mode, under device manager->Hard Disk Controllers I have:
PCI Bus Master Controller
Primary Ultra ATA Controller
Secondary Ultra ATA Controller
But in the fresh install, I have something different:
PCI Bus Master Controller (Same)
Primary IDE Controller
Secondary IDE Controller
What would lead to these differences? Is there some setting that is causing the cloned VM to think it has different hardware or configuration than the fresh install?