My P2V finally ran to completion in some small hour of the morning. I haven’t had time to boot it up yet but that is certainly good progress.
I don’t have any detailed technical explanation of why it finally worked but following my intuition, call it guesswork, got me through. Not ideal but there’s plenty of room for creativity in IT.
My initial attempt, after chopping out the NAS datastore (QNAP), VC Appliance and a bunch of services from my source machine, failed at 31% with a blue screen. The only change I made was to unplug a USB DVD writer and try again, at which point it ran to completion.
I will include a screenshot later.
My next steps will be to storage vmotion the target to the NAS, grow the disk (which was thin an minimal spec.) and see how it performs, assuming it works at all.