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tellis1969
Contributor
Contributor

Redhat Conversion NIGHTMARE

Hi;

I am a Redhat newbie by ANY stretch of the imagination and I was given and accepted the challenge of virtualizing our existing RedHat installation (ver. 5.11)...YES I know it is super old...but the hardware is dying so it is more important to get it off there first....to that end; I used the VMware converter tool which seems to work fine until the very end   97%...and then it fails....I then boot up with "No Operating System found"...even a dummy like me realizes that it is looking for the grub loader in the boot partition but I am clearly too stupid to understand the myriad of ways that people are tossing around to deal with it....I have found numerous articles about the same thing...sort of....but I still have NO idea how to fix it.

I recently tried this but when I try to access the directory they are referring to with vim...there is nothing there...so that is yet another dead end.

VMware P2V Linux Conversion – The Essential Methods

FAILED: An error occurred during the conversion: 'GrubInstaller::InstallGrub: /usr/lib/vmware-converter/installGrub.sh failed with return code: 0, and message: Installing GRUB1 on (hd0)... GNU GRUB version 0.97 (640K lower / 3072K upper memory) [ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For the first word, TAB lists possible command completions. Anywhere else TAB lists the possible completions of a device/filename.] grub> root (hd0,0) Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83 grub> setup (hd0) Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... no Checking if "/grub/stage1" exists... yes Checking if "/grub/stage2" exists... yes Checking if "/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes Running "embed /grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)"... 15 sectors are embedded. succeeded Running "install /grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+15 p (hd0,0)/grub/stage2 /grub/grub.conf"... failed Error 6:

Mismatched or corrupt version of stage1/stage2 grub> '

Could someone PLEASE give me precise instruction on what I can do to fix this and explain it as if you were talking to a 10 year old?

Thank you!!

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3 Replies
nachogonzalez
Commander
Commander

This might be useful:

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/67504

For what it seems RedHat 5.1 is not supported with converter

you can downgrade some binaries before launching the conversion

  1. Before the conversion, open a command line on the source machine and run the following command:
  2. yum downgrade lvm2-libs-2.02.180-10.el7_6.2.x86_64 lvm2-2.02.180-10.el7_6.2.x86_64 device-mapper-event-libs-1.02.149-10.el7_6.2.x86_64 device-mapper-1.02.149-10.el7_6.2.x86_64 device-mapper-libs-1.02.149-10.el7_6.2.x86_64 device-mapper-event-1.02.149-10.el7_6.2.x86_64
  3. After the conversion, run yum update on the target machine.

Let me know if that works

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Lalegre
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Hey tellis1969​,

Do not underestimate yourself like that, haha is okay not to know something and it will happen in our job a lot.

Please follow the next procedure to enable the root password as the same as the source VM in the Helper VM that is deployed in VMware as part of the P2V: VMware Knowledge Base

Once you are in connect using WinSCP or whatever and extract the helper.log that is inside the Helper VM (I do not remember in which path but search in /var and /opt). Of course for getting this you will need to try the conversion again.

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patanassov
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Hi

Let me start by mentioning that the suggestions in nachogonzalez' answer are misleasding (sorry). Converter 6.2 works with RHEL 5.1 (VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 6.2.0.1 Release Notes​). It is not supported because Converter is end of support, but it works. The KB article linked is about RHEL/CentOS 7.6; it is related to an issue that RedHat seemingly have fixed later (i.e. 7.7 is expected to be convert-able again)

The error in the message indicates that GRUB has failed to install. Converter calls the source VM's grub-install comand (after cloning all files). Something has failed in that call. One thing you can check is whether such executable exists on the source and how it behaves, Be careful since it can be a dangerous command to execute! Executing with '--version' or '--help' option is innocuous.

More details could be understood from the helper log. You don't really need to enable logging in helper. Just export the log bundle from Converter UI (right clink on the failed task) and dig in to find the helper log. Drill through worker and agent tasks to find it and attach it here for examination. Alternatively you may attach the whole bundle.

HTH,

Plamen

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