The next conversion attempt was clean. The driver started. The clone synced block by block.
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. The next conversion attempt was clean
She changed it to "Warn" (temporarily), ran gpupdate /force , rebooted again, and started the conversion. no incremental sync
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. ran gpupdate /force