VMware and recovery

[TrainsOfBritain]

This is a complete shot in the dark but I might as well give it a go. For some reason my Thinkstation S20 will not work with the recovery disks I downloaded from archive.org, it just gets stuck on "preparing hard disk" and never goes any further (left overnight).

I was wondering if there is anyway to boot this in VMware (I have tried but it auto reboots when the rescue recovery background comes up. Assume this is because its not detecting a think product) so that I can restore it to a hard drive and then put the hard drive back in the thinkstation!

No I don't want to do a "clean install" this is for archival/time capsual purposes. I want to use the factory image.


Thank you so much for any help