Vmware Vcenter Converter Standalone Unable To Start The Change Tracking Driver Apr 2026

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Same error.

Sarah remembered something from a deep-dive blog she’d read last year: Change Tracking driver issues are almost always about antivirus, stale driver remnants, or missing certificates.

She opened gpedit.msc and checked: System > Device Installation > Specify digital signature verification for device drivers. It was set to "Block." Even test-signed drivers were rejected. Same error

She checked if the driver was even present. On the source machine, she opened C:\Windows\System32\drivers and looked for vmware-ctk.sys . Nothing. That meant Converter never installed it properly—or the OS blocked it.

Sarah sighed. Not this again. She opened her browser and started the late-night ritual. The VMware forums were full of similar stories—admins stranded at the same 5% wall. Change tracking. That kernel-level driver used by Converter, Backup APIs, and replication tools to monitor disk block modifications. Without it, no incremental sync, no hot cloning. Just failure. It was set to "Block

She launched VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 6.2, clicked "Convert Machine," entered the source credentials, and hit next. The pre-check screen looked good—enough disk space, network reachable, agent uploaded. Then she clicked "Finish."

Bingo. The server had Hyper-V role installed (even though no VMs were running) and Device Guard enabled via group policy. Hyper-V and VMware’s change tracking driver cannot coexist—they fight for the same virtualization primitives. Nothing

It was 11:47 PM on a Friday. Sarah, a senior infrastructure engineer, was two hours into what should have been a routine P2V migration. The source machine: an aging Windows Server 2008 R2 box running a critical line-of-business app. The destination: a shiny new vSphere 7 cluster.

At 2:13 AM, the conversion finished. She shut down the source, powered on the VM, and the app came up without a hitch.

Sarah ran bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off , disabled Hyper-V from Windows Features, removed Device Guard via registry, and rebooted twice (the second to finalize).

She uninstalled Converter completely from the source machine (cleanup with Converter standalone clean-up utility ), deleted leftover VMware folders from ProgramData and AppData\Local , then reinstalled. Still broken.