Convert Drive without machine.

[wired2work]

We had a motherboard die in an old server, the IDE drives seem good to go. I tried ghosting the drives with Ghost 9 and then imported the drive images, but when the system tries to boot I get a bootinfo.ini error. I am wonder if it has to do with that I put these drives into another machine as slaves drives then ran the ghost images.

Would I be better off building VM disk images then ghosting the drives to them, then do a convert?

I just not sure where the VM converter looks for the hardware info.

Thanks

Wired

[esiebert7625]

You can try attaching the converted vmdk file to another working VM as a 2nd hard drive and then editing the boot.ini file to see if you can make it work. When you are done just remove the drive from the helper VM.

[wired2work]

The error is not with the boot.ini but with the \winnt\inf\biosinfo.inf file.

Error:

Windows 2000 could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \winnt\inf\biosinfo.inf file

Not sure if that helps or not.

thanks for any input.

wired

[admin]

How did you manage to Ghost the drives if the motherboard died? Did you attach the IDE drives to another machine and run Ghost to create the Ghost images?

You could create a new VM with blank .vmdk virtual disk(s). Power on the VM and boot off a Ghost Boot CD or floppy, connect over the network to your Ghost files, and restore the images onto the blank disks.

As esiebert7625 mentioned, you could attach these virtual disks to a working Windows VM to look inside them and verify that they contain all the files you expect. You may need to go in and edit the boot.ini to make sure that the proper partition number is listed.

Lastly, to make these virtual disks bootable you'll need to run Converter. Run Converter and select the "Configure" option and point to your VM with the virtual disks that have the restored Ghost images. Doing so will change the necessary drivers to make the disks bootable with VMware virtual hardware.

[wired2work]

K, I have figured out my biosinfo.ini error, for some reason some of the inf files were missing off the orig. drive, which I have replaced.

Now I can get further, which I am to the Stop 7B, which is the boot device issue, which I am working through.

I am able to ghost the drives, but from what I am learning it would appear that Ghost 9 and up not only copy the image but also device data. So that seems to cause more issues.

What I did also try was mounting the phy. drive as a VM drive and ghosting it using Ghost 2003 to another VM Drive, then run the import. And it still gives me the Boot Device error Stop 7b. I know at one time the real machine was a SCSI box then it was moved to an IDE system because of a SCSI hardware issue. But I don't know if the SCSI drivers were removed properly or not.

So if any one has some good tips on getting through the Stop 7b error, that would be great, I am working through MS Q822052 now

Wired.

[admin]

Does the Stop 7b error appear when you power on the VM? If so, shut down the VM, then run Converter's configure option and point to the VM. This step takes care of any hardware-specific issues by changing the registry and other files to recognize the VM's set of virtual hardware.

[wired2work]

Sometimes just being away from something allows you to see things you did not notice before... AKA Duh...

Any ways, I think I have this issue completed.

Basicly, because it was converting a Windows 2000 Server it was moving it to a SCSI drive even though the real drive was an IDE. So after creating an IDE drive ghosting the SCSI VM drive (or you could just re ghost the real hard drive) to the IDE, the VM came right up, detected new hardware and good to go.

The issue was the VM wanted to see the SCSI hard disk when 2000 wanted to see an IDE drive.

Thanks for everyones help, can finally sleep at night now....

wired

[admin]

Yes, by default VMs will create SCSI disks, not IDE. With ESX Server, you don't have the option of IDE disks.