FTdisk.SYS device driver error when moving VM

Using VMware Player. Moved a Windows 2000 (yeah, still got these!) VM from one machine to another yesterday.

After boot up Windows 2000 BSOD’d with the following error:

STOP: c000026c {unable to load device driver}
\Systemroot\System32\Drivers\FTdisk.SYS device driver could not be loaded.
Error status was 0xc0000221

I have seen such errors in physical machines due to hardware changes or corruptions but wasn’t sure what to do in a virtual machine. It was just a copy paste of the files from one machine to another after all. The underlying physical hardware was different, and the host OS was Windows 7 instead of Windows XP but none of that should affect the virtual machine.

I downgraded the VMware Player version on the target to the outdated one as the source but that didn’t help either.

Then I copy pasted the files again and now they work! Weird.

Could be that the initial copy-paste had some corruptions. Or maybe after downgrading VMware Player I should have copy-pasted again because the initial copy was modified during the first boot up by VMware Player, introducing some incompatibilities? During the first boot up VMware Player had asked if I copied or moved and based on that it will have modified the configuration file a bit.