P2V Failure at 98% - Unable to find the system volume

[ajharn]

Hi All,

I'm having trouble with my first P2V attempt in a long while.  I have studied many posts and KB articles on similar problems but have yet to find the solution, though I suspect it is something simple as it appears to be a common problem with newbs like me.

I am trying P2Ving an XP-SP3 machine onto one of my ESXi 4.x servers.

I am using Converter Stand Alone 5.01 installed directly on the source machine, running on the local admin account.

I receive the following error messages in the Converter GUI interface at the 98% mark. (I have attached full converter logs)

FAILED: Unable to find the system volume, reconfiguration is not possible.

Warning: Unable to update boot.ini on the destination machine's system volume.

Error: An error occurred during reconfiguration.

The source machine is a Dell with a utility partition.  In the conversion wizard, I deselect the Utility partition, leaving only the Windows install partition checked.

I modified the boot.ini on the source machine BEFORE conversion, to change the partition pointers...here is what it looks like.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

The boot.ini does exist on the target VM after the failed attempt and appears as above.  The target VM won't boot, and behaves like it can't find a system formatted boot drive.  Booting into Recovery Consloe with an XP disk and trying either FIXBOOT or FIXMBR does not help.

I can mount the drive in another VM and browse it's contents.  I have also tried converting it once as an IDE drive and once as a Buslogic SCSI drive.  Both produce the same results.  The drive and files are there, but image won't boot.

I cannot reconfigure the machine with Converter.  Attempting produces the same set of errors as above.

Please advise on what I need to do to make that image bootable.  All help appreciated.  Thanks much!

[patanassov]

Hi

it occurs sometimes that the source system may have several volumes marker as active (in case of multiple disks). Converter can get confused in such a situation. You may check that in disk manager. If this happens to be the case, mark all but the boot volume as inactive using diskpart.

If that is not the case, you may try another workaround - convert first only the system volume. It should succeed hopefully. Then convert all other volumes w/o reconfiguration to another VM. Finally attach the resulting vmdks from the second conversion to the result of the first convertersion.

HTH

Plamen

[continuum]

If you have a boot.ini and ntldr and ntdetect.com in the vmdk you may be able to boot the VM by starting from a floppy image such as the attached.
If that works - expected outcome would be a bluescreen 7b - the rest could be done manually.

[ajharn]

Thanks to both of you for the feedback.

The base problem is that on the source machine there is one drive with two partions.  The Dell utility partition is marked as System and active and the XP partition is boot.

Most best practice guides on P2V I see say don't convert the utility partition...but in this case, wouldn't bringing both partions over do the trick and save me all this trouble?

Continuum, I do have boot.ini and ntldr + ntdetect on the XP partition.  I can boot from an XP CD and load the recovery console.  My understanding is that doing a fixboot and fixmbr from there would make the volume System, but that doesn't seem to be the case.  In your message you say after I boot the machine from disk, the rest can be done manaully.  Can  you please give me more guidance on what you think I need to do after booting from disk?

Thanks much.

[ajharn]

SOLVED:

Indeed, I just went ahead and converted again and let the system formatted utility partition get converted along with the Windows partition this time and everything worked fine.  If anyone thinks this may cause other problems down the road, I'd appreciate any feedback.  For the time being, the VM is up and running and working well.

Thanks for your input everyone.

[winsrv]

I have a similar problem, but after booting the VM by starting from a floppy image i have a BSOD.

You say the rest could be done manually, I am open to any suggestion.

[richardOST]

winsrv - if you can give Converter 4.3 a try. I've had better luck with that version for most servers than 5.01.

Thanks,

Richard