Windows 2000 Pro VM fails to boot after P2V, black screen with solid cursor

[herrchin]

Booting stops at a black screen with a solid horizontal cursor line.

I have tried everything I could find to fix this and have failed. The biggest clue is that I can create a virtual floppy with Ntldr, Ntdetect.com, and the boot.ini, and it boots fine off that. The boot.ini references the main disk, so I'm thinking partition/bootsector/MBR issue. I have used a windows 2000 server (not Professional) disk to bring up a recovery console, but neither the automated recovery procedure nor using FIXBOOT and FIXMBR makes the system boot on its own. I've used a GParted CD and verified the partition is Active.

Is there something simple I am missing? Is the Windows 2000 Server fixboot/fixmbr not sufficient for a Professional box (would surprise me)?

[continuum]

good troubleshooting - you have already done all the things I would have suggested.

Really strange.

Did you also check the boot settings in virtual BIOS - make sure that "bootable add-in cards" really is on top of the list of "harddisks"

Do you use the same boot.ini you have on the virtual disk for the floppy-imageas well ?

If you have a boot.ini that references the disk using signatures i would change this to the simple boot.ini you have on the floppy

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VMX-parameters- VMware-liveCD - VM-Sickbay

[herrchin]

I tried "bootable add-in" both before and after the virtual SCSI disk, same behavior.

All 3 boot files are the same on the floppy and the hard disk. I even copied the files from the floppy to the hard disk since they're known-good.

boot.ini is:

[d-12537]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional"

I have some colleagues scrounging up windows 2000 pro discs for me to try, but that's a long shot that I don't have much hope for.

[herrchin]

I was able to solve this issue by running my P2V again, and switching to SCSI disks as part of the conversion (source was IDE and default is to keep the same style). The system partition was greater than 8GB, and even though the OS was Win2k SP4 which supports >8GB IDE, and it ran fine on the source system, perhaps something along that vein was still problematic.