Post the upgrade of a VMware infrastructure from ESX 3.5 to vSphere 4, I encountered an issue when upgrading the Virtual Machines. I had already installed the latest VMware tools and after upgrading the hardware from version 4 to version 7 I wanted to remove the standard NIC attached to each Virtual Machine and attach the new vmxnet3 NIC.
A while ago I had an old computer with a single IDE hard disk in it running Windows XP Pro with many applications installed. I had a second computer with totally different hardware (different motherboard, vga, lan etc) and I wanted to move the hard disk from the old computer into the second one, retaining my windows installation/applications and boot from it. I was determined not to install Windows XP Pro again so I started looking into why the disk wouldn't boot when moved onto new hardware. It turns out that it's a problem with the driver for the IDE controller.