On 4/28/2010 12:55 PM, JohnS wrote:
On Wed, 2010-04-28 at 12:39 -0500, Les Mikesell 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.