P2V of w2k with dynamic disks/software raid

[TedH256]

Hi -

Can anyone help confirm whether the stand alone converter should be able to do a live conversion of a w2k box that has phsyical drives that are mirrored by windows? We completed a conversion, but the resultant VM could not boot - did not see it's disks.

If this will not work - do you know of any other tools that will allow us to do this? Basically this is a "critical" server that cannot be re-installed (legacy software, long gone install media, company is gone, etc ...) so we need to find a way to virtualize it as it's hardware is getting really old.

Suggestions welcomed!

[DSTAVERT]

oh and by the way "workstation 6" is not on the list of options: only "other virtual machine type" ...

Select "Other Virtual Machine" and then Workstation 6

[TedH256]

OK so I chose "other" and later selected workstation 6

This time, the error is:

ERROR: Failed to take snapshot of a source volume.

Possible causes include not having any NTFS volumes on Windows XP or Windows 2003 source systems,

and not having enough free disk space.

Which is silly - the w2k disks are ntfs and the server I am running the converter on has sufficient disk space.

What a run-around.

Is it impossible to P2V windows dynamic disks on w2k, or not?

Clearly the 3.03 option is not going to work - I have requested vmware to get me a license for it, just so that we can try to do this directly to the esx host but I am not going to hold my breath for that.

Can anyone think of any other options for getting this box to convert?

If I could grub up a symantec ghost disk, can the embedded converter in vc 4.1 import those?

[DSTAVERT]

Sorry you are having difficulty but not many people are doing conversions of W2K these days. Memories of what worked and didn't and how one worked around particular issues fade after a while. You can encounter stuborn P2V conversions. You just need to keep at it untill the conversion is successful.

You can have a try with Converter 5 Beta http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/beta/public_converter_50?view=overview

I remember at times doing a conversion of a conversion to get a particular difficult machine to function. I remember using tools like Drivesnapshot to take an image and then restoring to a fresh VM using a BartPE disk. I have used Acronis images and converted those.

[TedH256]

oh yes - I am aware that w2k conversions are few now, and that problems could be legion.

I do find the documentation that is available to be lacking (are dynamic disks on source supported? Will cold cloning work with dynamic disks? etc  ), but that is another story.

As for converter 5 - does it support w2k conversions?

I've not used many other tools to do image creation ---> conversion. Hopefully we will find SOMETHING that will work for this machine.

[DSTAVERT]

I don't ever remember converting dynamic disks so I can't say whether it would work or not. The only thing you can do is try it. Don't know whether 5 will support w2k but you can check the documentation. You can try the VMware cold clone disk. If I remember it is or was on the vCenter ISO file. Have no idea whether it will work with dynamic disks.

[continuum]

do you have a Ghost or Acron is CD ... or a Linux LivedCD ?

then just create a fulldisk image and restore it into a VM