It looks like my system board fried. So, I thought, why not take the hard-drive out, put it in an external enclosure and virtualize the machine. Went to Best Buy and bought a SATA - USB3 external enclosure.
I have Workstation 8 (latest updates), running on Windows 7. The hard-drive of my old machine is intact, and I can see the files just fine (via USB enclosure).
I removed the drive letters of both partitions (it was showing up as J: and K: on PhysicalDisk6 ), created a VM with similar CPU / OS / Memory characteristics (Vista x32 with 4 Cores and 2 Gigs) and selected "Use Physical Disk" for my hard-drive, pointing to PhysicalDisk6.
The boot screen came up and quickly went to a blue-screen. So, I got a warning message about using Physical disks with the recommended SCSI controller. I changed to LSI SAS and Workstation gives me an "Internal Error" when creating the VM and BusLogic is not supported......
So, I'm out of ideas.
Any help would be appreciated.
--Ken