Jul 20 2010 4:03AM GMT

P2V Conversion Fails, OS will not boot

Nathan Simon Profile: Nathan Simon

Sometimes you get a server that fails to convert, i.e. it just won’t boot. If you use a Recovery CD (Windows Server 2003/2008 Install Disk) you can see that the files are all there, but it just refuses to boot no matter what you do. Well here is what I ran into… ESX Host was ESX 4.1(same results when running ESX 4.0 Update 2) and the guest OS to be converted was Server 2003 R2. Using VMware Convertor 4.1 i tried to convert it a few times using different settings and different SCSI Adapters, all the while never worrying about which version of vHardware i was converting to, which was v7. So after many failed attempts, Ithough what if I use v4 hardware and upgrade from there, well what do you know, I was correct. Sometimes a guest OS just cannot handle the bump in vHardware. So after that, all i had to do was install VMware tools for ESX 4.1 then update the vhardware… done…. hope this helps someone.

-NS