[FIX] Migrate Windows Server 2003 to VMWare ESXi fails to boot - white non-flashing curser

I recently used VMWare Standalone Converter to migrate a physical Windows Server 2003 machine to a Virtual machine Infrastructure host. However, the machine would not boot up on ESXi 4. All that appeared on the screen was a white, non-blinking cursor at the top left of the screen.

Turns out, after a lot of troubleshooting, that ESXi can't handle virtual IDE drives - they must be SCSI, either LSI Logic or Bus Logic. After following this guide to setup SSH on ESX server, I then followed the instructions at the VMWare help site to convert the virtual IDE disk to SCSI (with LSI Logic controller). I used vi to edit the required file, as nano is not available on ESXi.

After the conversion was complete, the machine booted perfectly.

How to open Microsoft Word files in VIrtualBox Windows from Ubuntu

There's a great article about how to setup your system to you can double click a file in Ubuntu, and have it open in a Windows machine within VirtualBox. This, along with the seamless display technology built into the latest VirtualBox release, allows some pretty amazing integration scenarios.