Ok, here is my problem. I am having problems restoring a physical machine into a VM
from a Tivoli Storage Manager backup.
Now, let me start by saying that this process works and we have it documented. (We
use this process as part of our bare-metal-recovery strategy for DR purposes).
Under normal circumstances, what we do is create a new VM, boot it to a recovery CD,
partition the drives, restore the OS from a TSM image backup, patch the MBR and
bootsector, and then run the "reconfigure" option of the VMWare Standalone Convertor (4.0.1).
We have successfully tested and done bare-metal-restores of
Windows 2003, 2008 and 2008R2 into new VMs this way.
Now, here is where the failures/problems come in:
If the physical machine has a Dell EISA partition, the whole process fails and the
server boots to a blank black screen with the dreaded unblinking cursor. And,
this is even after editing boot.ini (on Windows 2003) to reflect the new
Windows partition (1) rather than (2).I've also checked to make sure my partitions
are active, all the necessary boot files are in place, and that the starting
sector offset values are correct on my destination drives.
Unfortunately, the TSM client will not back up unlettered drives, so when we do the restore,
we cannot restore the EISA partition into the new VM (and we really don't want
it anyway). But it seems that somehow the omission of this partition is causing
us problems.
What I really don't understand yet is why? Especially when you consider that doing a
live conversation of the same server, and choosing to omit the EISA partition
from the final VM works like a charm. And, doing a TSM restore/P2V of the same
server, built without the EISA partition also works flawlessly.
Does anyone have any experience with that that can shed some light on where I should
look to fix this? In the past, when I have dealt with unbootable systems stuck
at black screens, it was due to incorrect starting offsets. But this doesn't
seem to be the case this time?
Any ideas? Anyone?
