Ok, I first have to say how blown away I am that I was able to get this to work. Here's the scenario. I was unsuccessful in having VMWare Fusion run my Vista x64 Boot Camp partition (probably for this reason). After many fits and starts, the plan was to create a Vista Complete PC Restore image to an external drive. Then create a VMWare Fusion Vista x64 VM and restore the backup to the VM. The first thing I learned is that Complete PC Restore must restore the image to a drive that is as large (or larger) than the original drive. This is apparently because the backup is a true disk image and not a file backup. Well, this posed a small waste of time because I had created a pre-allocated 250GB vmdk that now had to be scrapped for a 500GB dynamic volume. Also, during the restore, I received an error. I attempted the restore a second time without checking the box to format the drive, and this time time it took.

After a night-long restore of the image, I came into my office in the morning to find the VM repeatedly rebooting do to a Vista blue screen and Vista set to automatically reboot after a stop. I left the VM in a suspended state and went to work. Later on in the evening, I set out to fix the problem. The problem was a 7B stop, which means that a hardware driver for the mass storage unit was not loading at boot. Well, sure, I now have a new IDE controller; as far as Vista is concerned.

Ah, but this is where is gets slick. Vista is now equipped with a revised recovery console, or WinRE. The long and short of it was that I was able to edit the registry from the recovery console. Yes, phat, I know! The docs on how to do this at MS are missing a step (they fail to mention that you need to edit within the "offline" key), so I was able to find better docs elsewhere. This combined with the information as to what registry keys to edit from MS, I was in business. As for that last page from MS, all I did was change the Start value on the two drivers from 4 to 0.

w00t!