Tag: P2V

Recently my parents switched to a Mac from a PC, and I helped set things up for them. The machine was quite nice, a new iMac Retina, and I helped my dad migrate their old PC to a VM on the new Mac. Now, this entire process is pretty straightforward. You put the Mac and the PC on the same network, input a four digit token (or input an IP and port), then authenticate with a user and password, and things should work.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite the case for me. The Windows system wanted to have UAC disable on the Windows 8 Machine, which isn’t a problem, but the error message wouldn’t go away. Problem was, that it was a pretty generic error message “A failure occurred”, without even so much as an error code that made any sense. The log files also didn’t work.

While I was guessing it might be related to a username problem (spaces in the username), I tried several things on the Windows side, and checked the user on the Mac as well. It was then I found out that under OSX Mavericks, you can now enable using an iCloud password, which was already set up (using a screenshot here of my MacBook Pro as an example):

Long story short, as soon as I used a separate local password for the user, the P2V migration worked like a charm. I enabled the iCloud password again, and the migration wouldn’t go through. Since I wasn’t able to find this in the VMware KB, I figured I might as well share this here.