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Blank Screen on VM

  • 1.  Blank Screen on VM

    Posted Mar 23, 2006 06:08 PM

    Hi,

    I have just P2v'd and then converted a VM, when it boots after POST it just has a Blank Screen.

    Any ideas?

    Dan



  • 2.  RE: Blank Screen on VM

    Posted Mar 23, 2006 06:11 PM

    What guest OS?



  • 3.  RE: Blank Screen on VM

    Posted Mar 23, 2006 06:14 PM

    You can try running a chkdsk /f and/or fdisk /mbr on the VM. I've seen where that can fix issues like yours.

    Chris



  • 4.  RE: Blank Screen on VM

    Posted Mar 23, 2006 08:24 PM

    I believe I have seen this before on a P2V machine a couple of weeks ago. Try deleting the entire virtual machine EXCEPT the virtual disks that attached to this vm. Then re-create the virtual machine and point the vm to the P2V virtual disks. I believe that will take care of the issue. I hope that I am right. I performed about 75 P2V's the last seven weeks and I thought I came across this issue.

    A dumb question before doing what I said above, did you perform a System Reconfiguration on the OS virtual drive?

    Michael



  • 5.  RE: Blank Screen on VM

    Posted Mar 23, 2006 11:25 PM

    I solved this but setting the c:\ as disk0.

    Weird one this.....as its not allowing me to logon to the box it freezes on the WINdows logon.



  • 6.  RE: Blank Screen on VM

    Posted Mar 27, 2006 08:14 PM

    I have this also. Not figured it out yet - still trawling the KB. Any help appreciated. Proliant DL360 G1 - Dual P3 1.4GHz - 1024MB RAM - 2x18GB in RAID1 on internal Smartarray 5i.

    Machine OS is Windows 2000 Std server, SP4 with rollup.

    P2v will not mount the disk system. Have tried P2V 2, 2.0.3 and 2.1. Have also tried all 3 helpers with each version of the boot CD. No joy.

    So I used GHOST 9. Now getting the same symtoms - blank screen on boot. Have tried booting from ERD commander CD ISO image and edited the boot.ini to reflect the new disk and partition number. Still the same.

    Last chance hotel was to used PQ Drive image and then restore to a newly created empty VM disk. No joy here either.

    Clean out of ideas now so all help most gratefully received.

    Thanks

    Dom.



  • 7.  RE: Blank Screen on VM

    Posted Sep 23, 2006 07:29 PM

    Hi All,

    A little bit too late but this might help.

    I had this issue yesterday. P2Ved a Compaq Proliant 5500 with BartPe (XPE). loaded the ghost image into a new VM (Vmware workstation). P2Ved it with UltimateP2V (injecting the VMSCSI drivers and reg settings into the OS). restarted and got that black screen with a fixed cursor. I restarted the VM on Bartpe and did an MBR restore with symantec's restorembr.exe (ghost 9 CD). Restarted and the VM booted fine.

    Voilà



  • 8.  RE: Blank Screen on VM

    Posted Oct 18, 2006 08:57 PM

    dsolds, that win2k security rollup can cause some problems. It installs a SCSI driver that is incompatible with VMware, but the solution is easy. Run a search on that harddrive for scsiport.sys (from the P2V-Helper VM) and you should see the file in windows/system32/drivers/. If this is the problem, the date on that file will be sometime in 2004. What you need to do is get the older version of that file (from June of 2003, I believe), which will hopefully turn up from the uninstall directory. If it isn't there, you can get it from any Win2k VM that boots properly.



  • 9.  RE: Blank Screen on VM

    Posted Sep 25, 2006 02:01 PM

    What version of ESX? I'm getting this too on every P2V I try to do but ONLY since I've upgraded to VI3. I can't even get the machine to blue-screen after i restore the image. Just a blank screen. It also seems like I have to re-boot a few times before I can even get the POST screen that allows me to boot from CD.



  • 10.  RE: Blank Screen on VM

    Posted Jan 29, 2007 11:53 PM

    I just experienced the same issue on windows server 2003. Startup of P2V'd image using Ghost 8.3 resulted in a blank screen (black) with a single frozen dash in the upper left-hand corner.

    We fixed the problem by re-writing the MBR record. Make sure you understand the fixmbr command before you use it!

    1) on the problem p2v'd vm guest, boot to the Windows server installation CD.

    2) select "R" for recovery console

    3) select 1 for your c:\windows installation

    4) enter the admin password for the problem p2v'd vm guest

    5) issue the fix MBR command >fixmbr \Device\HardDisk0

    (see microsoft 326215 and http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/reskit/prork/pref_tts_pnzw.mspx?mfr=true for details on this command)

    Gene_H



  • 11.  RE: Blank Screen on VM

    Posted Nov 26, 2008 12:58 PM

    I have the black screen with a single cursor on a converted VM (SVR2003). I cannot boot to the SVR2003 recovery console CD because everytime I reboot the VM I get the black screen.. no VM POST screen..

    Can anyone offer any good idea's to try?

    It's taken a whil eto get this physical machine converted, numerous attempts and finally ended up with not installing VMware tools or customisation.. so we now have the converted VM but just the black screen when we try and power up..

    All advice greatly appreciated here

    thanks



  • 12.  RE: Blank Screen on VM

    Posted Jun 17, 2010 09:36 PM

    vmware black screen after p2v conversion - I realise this is an old post but this may be relevent. I recently had the same issue. What I found was that the VM had in fact booted. However I was trying to view the Esxi server using the VI client on a remote server. The problem manifested itself in that I had RDP'd on to the remote server using only 256 colour depth as this is normal. But when you then launch the VI client and open the console of a VM on the Esxi server the screen is black! The default VGA settings for the Virtual Machine you converted are most likely to be 1280x1024x32bit or some such thing. If you have this scenario it can be solved. I launched RDP but before connecting to my remote server I changed the colour depth to 32bit. I know this will be slower but who cares at this point. Then once connected to the remote server I launch the VI client and open the console of the converted machine, hey presto I can see the video on the virtual machine! Another trick is to install VNC on the machine to be converted BEFORE you convert it. Then as long as it has network configured you can VNC on to it after conversion.