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.
> --
>
> 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.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com