VMware vSphere

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  • 1.  Inaccessible Boot Device on an upgraded NT4 box

    Posted Apr 29, 2007 02:31 AM

    Hi All,

    I've been using the new converter version released earlier this week and have had success with NT4, W2K and W2k3, however I have run into problems with one system that someone has upgraded from Windows NT4 to Windows 2000. When they did the upgrade they upgraded it to a new location rather than doing an 'in place' upgrade. As a result, there is an N: which contains the boot.ini, and an M: which contains the Windows 2000 OS. When converter installs it sees the N: as the active partition and the M: as the system partition. The migration completes successfully (we did have to make a change to the boot.ini file) however we're asked which OS we want to boot, NT or 2K (like it's dual booting) and the blue screen results after selecting 2K with an inaccessible boot device. We have tried:

    \- running the conversion again

    \- configuring the M: once it's been pulled over

    \- Booting the vm in safe mode - we can see it trying to read from system32 on the M: then it blue screens

    \- Changing the scsi disk id

    \- changes to boot.ini

    Could it be that the virtual drivers are not being loaded on the m: so it's still looking for physical hardware when it tries to boot? That's one thought - another thought is to try and pull it over with P2VA or ghost but I'm not convinced that's going to make any difference.

    I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that this NT4 / 2K hybrid is not a good candidate for virtualization but need to get it over if at all possible. If anyone has run into this before or has any ideas please let me know!!

    Thanks very much!

    John



  • 2.  RE: Inaccessible Boot Device on an upgraded NT4 box

    Posted Apr 29, 2007 02:43 AM

    One thing I forgot to mention that we tried - changing the SCSI controller between buslogic and LSI.........didn't help

    Thanks again!



  • 3.  RE: Inaccessible Boot Device on an upgraded NT4 box

    Posted Apr 29, 2007 01:41 PM

    Did you check to see if it had Dynamic Disks? Will it boot into Safe Mode?



  • 4.  RE: Inaccessible Boot Device on an upgraded NT4 box

    Posted Apr 29, 2007 04:21 PM

    Nope, it had basic disks and would not boot in safe mode......



  • 5.  RE: Inaccessible Boot Device on an upgraded NT4 box
    Best Answer

    Posted Apr 29, 2007 03:20 PM

    I would make the M: partition bootable - set it to active and then remove the boot.ini from the N: partition.



  • 6.  RE: Inaccessible Boot Device on an upgraded NT4 box

    Posted Apr 29, 2007 04:22 PM

    That's exactly what we ended up doing - moved the boot.ini, ntldr and ntdetect to the M;, mounted it on a helper VM, ran P2V assistant against it and it booted............

    Thanks