On 4/28/2010 1:28 PM, JohnS wrote:
Running the VMware converter tool from an old Dell Win2k server with an IDE disk to produce an ESXi image went through the motions but the image wouldn't boot - but doing the same thing to a vmware server (v1) image file over a network share worked. Has anyone seen that before?
Well for those that must have a Windows OS heres the hack:
You must go to microsoft.com search for the tools to allow that. What it does is Relax The Windows IDE Checks so the disk or image can be used as a VM or on other hardware. You must also have the same ACPI Options in your hypervisor.
This must be done before you use the vmware tools to create the image.
Thanks - I assumed it had something to do with the old style bios geometry because I can boot the VM with a linux rescue disk and see what I expect, but the boot loader can't find it. What seems odd to me is that it works fine when the conversion is to a VMware server image file but not when going directly to ESXi (which I'd expect to be smarter). I haven't tried it yet, but I'll bet that I can run the converter again, using the .vmx as the source and ESXi as the target and it will work without any changes to the windows OS.
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Well, thinking in that term it should work. Lets us know. I do know when I first tried it doing images from real hardware is when I hit the problem. VM to VM should work in theory.
Yep - running live->image, then image->ESXi worked where the direct live->ESXi did not. I had 2 IDE based Dell machines like that (one had the hidden Dell recovery partition, one didn't) but a similar-vintage Dell SCSI worked fine with the direct conversion. I tried an assortment of mbr/boot fixups on the failing conversions but none worked - another guy poked around a little more and thought it had the bios C/H/S settings wrong in the direct conversion.