Well everyone. I want to thank you all for the suggestions. I will post now what all I did, and finally what I did to get the machine to work.
Steps I did:
Installed VmWare Converter on a laptop. The laptop was imaged with a corporate image. There was a small 1 MB parition that wasn't assigned a drive or formatted. I used gparted to grow the NTFS volume and get rid of the small partition. I disjoined the laptop from the domain. I changed the policies so that you wouldn't need to hit "CTRL-ALT'DEL" to log in or even enter a password; so it went to the desktop once it booted (like someones home PC).
So with all of that, the conversion woudl always get to the high 90's (say 97 or 98%) then fail. One thing I tried was to change a setting in the VMWare converter to configure the virtual machine. If I removed that option, then the conversion worked, and I ended up with a 40GB .VMDK file. I use VirtualBox on my Mac. I went through the steps on the Mac to load the hard disk into Virtual Box and it would start to load, then I get blue screen for a second then back to the loop. It went so fast that I couldn't see what the errors were. So I used Quicktime to record my desktop as the Windows virtual tried to load. Success! At least I could see the error, but it still wouldn't work. After some research, it appeared to be an issue if I used a SATA drive rather than IDE.
Look at the attached word doc to see the steps that I used, and it finally loaded. I will also attach the screen shot of the blue screen errors from the virtual.
In case you can't view the attached word doc with screen shots, here are the steps I took to get it to work:
- Create virtual machine using Virtual Box
- Select amount of memory (I recommend 2048 for Windows 7 VM)
- Choose “Do not add a virtual hard drive”. You will add one later
- Once the virtual is created, go to the settings for that machine, and click on the storage tab. Right click the SATA controller and remove it.
- Select “Controller : IDE” and then hit the “+” sign at the bottom and choose to add a hard disk
- When you see this box, select “choose existing disk”
- After you browse for the disk and add it, you will see this. Note that I usually like to keep my disks in the ~/Documents/Virtual Machines folder just for convenience
- Once you are done with settings, click “OK” Then start the virtual machine. It will power on and you should see the following: