cold cloning iso

[tdubb123]

I am having issues p2v a vm that has a E drive 6TB and converting it down to 100GB

It keeps failing at 94%

I tried chkdsk, defrag and nothing works

is there cold cloining offline p2v vmware converter available?

any suggestions?

[Alex_Romeo]

Hi,

it is very similar to your problem, considering that in this article we are talking about 2 TB. It is worth trying the proposed workaround

VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 6.2.0.1 Release Notes

Conversion job with no volume selected for shrinking fails with the following error message: 'An error occurred during the conversion: 'Block level cloning does not support shrinking volumes'

Converting a Windows source that has an LDM volume that is larger than 2 TB and the first disk of the volume is an MBR disk fails with the following error message: 'An error occurred during the conversion: 'Block level cloning does not support shrinking volumes'. Converter attempts to create an MBR disk larger than 2 TB on the destination but the limit of MBR disks is 2 TB.

The error does not occur on LDM volumes with a GPT first disk, because the destination disk type supports sizes larger than 2 TB.

Workaround: Convert the LDM volume at file level. Trigger the file-level cloning by shrinking volume size.

VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 6.2.0.1 Release Notes

ARomeo

[tdubb123]

it is alreay cloining at file level after i resize the drive in the destination

[Alex_Romeo]

Hi,

ah! ok! so if there is only data in the "E: /" partition, you can convert the physical machine excluding that disk, then you can create a new 100 GB disk on the new virtual machine and make a copy of the data.

È possibile utilizzare un hdd esterno per lo spostamento dei dati.

ARomeo

[Robert_Racansky]

"is there cold cloining offline p2v vmware converter available?"

There was, about 10 years ago.

Being able to boot to a Vmware P2V Live CD saved me more than a few times when we were virtualizing our data center.

I don't know why it isn't still available.    It seemed to have disappeared from VMware's site about a year or two later.

[continuum]

The coldclone LiveCD was based on Windows 2003 32bits.

Windows 2003 is nowadays no longer a good platform because the driver-support for latest hardware is severly limited.

I still have a construction kit that creates one - but it no longer makes real sense.

Nowadays you use a Linux LiveCD instead - you mount a directory on a VMFS datastore in writeable mode and then simply use ddrescue to copy the disks you need.

Driver patching can then be done with latest Converter downloads.

[PePierias]

I'd be more than grateful if you could provide a cold clone livecd. I have the task to p2v our sole 2k3 R2 servers (old, like the cold clone livecd) which are also our domain controllers. Hot p2v'ing the machine is strongly discouraged, hence the safe route for me would be to use the converter.

If they were not DCs I'd prolly go with your suggestion, ie dd the disks and get done with it...

[continuum]

Hi PePieras

I can help you with either a construction kit or a ready to use Iso.

But I will not post any links in public - so I would suggest to continue this discussion via skype.

Regards Ulli