Not detecting hard drives after conversion

[Theta12]

I just used the latest release of converter 3.0 to do a hot clone of a physical Windows 2003 server (with mirrored drives). Everything went well and the task completed sucessfully. I can look at my destination server (virtual server 1.0.1 running on windows 2003 host) and see the files are there. Everything looks correct in the vmdk file and vmx file (0:0 is pointing to the correct location and it is active), but when I boot the virtual server it doesn't detect any hard drives and keeps trying to network boot via PXE.

My virtual hard drive is configured as SCSI 0:0 (as it should be). I tried switching it to 0:1 thinking maybe the MBR got messed up somehow but that didn't work either. So, I booted with the Windows 2003 CD to try and go to the recovery console to try and fix MBR and when I do that, it tells me that there are no hard disk drives present.

Did I just miss a step in the conversion process or is there something else I'm not doing correctly? I've used P2V on several servers and have never run across this problem. Like I said, I can see all of the vmdk files and they appear to be the correct size.

[thanifan]

I'm just guessing here, but were they hardware mirrored drives or software mirrored drives?

I've converted many raid 5 and raid 1 servers and haven't had a problem with converter getting the disks working on the 1st try

it's a bit annoying but you could have the VM boot off the Win2k3 cd and see if setup detects the drives just to make sure it's working and visible to windows

[thanifan]

can you try breaking the mirror in windows before you do the conversion?

I know it's a lot of overhead if that doesn't work and you need to re-mirror the disk but I'd bet that would work

of course, I haven't used the Windows mirroring for a long time, nor have I tried to convert an image and send it to VMWare Server so this is still just my best guess

[Theta12]

Disks were mirrored via Disk management in Windows. I tried to boot off of the CD again and it is still not detecting any drives. I've tried the repair option and the 'new install' option.

I also ran a defrag on the drive to see if that would help, but I still have the same results.

[puniyal]

I have the same issues. I also configured the newly created VMWare image but when trying to boot up it still cannot find the hard drives. I had used Symantec livestate recovery image and the using the vmware converter 3.0 on it (The Windows 2000 servers had IDE drives (RAID1/RAID5)). Using VMWare server 1.0 on Windows 2003.

[Theta12]

I could, but will have to wait for after hours to do that. I really don't think it's the fact that the drive was mirrored but I could be wrong. It's almost as if the partition isn't marked as active.

[Theta12]

I just used BartPE to verify that the data is there. I can boot with BartPE and see the C:\ and d:\ drives. The data is intact and is in the correct format/location, there's just something messed up with the way vm or windows is detecting the hard drive.

[thanifan]

have you gone through the steps to recover from a failed disk, treating it like it had been mirrored and a disk just died? like I said it's been awhile but in NT you had to boot from a floppy and do something to the MBR like making it active

[Theta12]

Well, I still don't have it booting yet but I did discover something. I added this virtual drive to another virtual server I already had running to see if I could see anything that way. When I looked at the drive in Device Manager, it showed both partitions to be extended partitions which would explain why it's not finding a boot partition. It still doesn't make since (even if there's not an 'active' partition) why niether VMware nor Windows won't even detect that there's a device there. When I get errors like this with a physical device, it usually means the drive is toast or the electronics have failed. Maybe I'm just not understanding correctly how vmware works with virtual drives.

[Theta12]

Any help out there for this one or am I just going to have to revert back to P2V?

[rzeisler]

Is the Host OS for VMs Linux or Windows?

[Martin_Graetz]

Hi. I was facing the same problem. Source disk was software mirrored.

After a lot of tries with BartPE, recovery utilities and so on I broke the mirror and ran Converter again. This worked.

[rzeisler]

Did you "break the mirror" by removing one of the harddrives or did you do something in the Computer Management control panel?

[Martin_Graetz]

I did "break mirror" in "Disk Management". The duplicate partitions then get their own drive letters (which I ignored in the conversion process).

Important is, that the system disk is shown in orange/red in VMware-Converter (which means active/system).

[Theta12]

If the only way a hot clone will work is to break a mirror then I guess I'll just have to revert to a cold clone. Thanks for all the input.

[pdmana]

You should convert the dynamic disks to basic disk. This can only be done if the mirror is broken. Converter can not handle dynamic disks, see many forums discussions.

good luck

[KFM]

You should convert the dynamic disks to basic disk.

This can only be done if the mirror is broken.

Converter can not handle dynamic disks, see many

forums discussions.

good luck

Actually it can handle dynamic disks, but for best results I recommend to do a cold clone rather than a hot clone. See my post here http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=618663&#618663