Boot Existing VM to CD - No hard drive found

[DingoDuck]

I have an issue where a VM was created with Windows Server 2008 R2 64 bit but should have been created with Server 2003 R2 32 bit.  When I try to boot to a ISO of the correct OS, the install gets to the point where it says setup cannot continue because there is no hard drive found.  I have no idea why it says it can't find a hard drive.

The reason I'm doing it this way instead of just making a new VM is that this VM was purposed as a license server and the licenses files were generated with the MAC of this VM machine.  I've tried to create a new VM while manually setting the MAC but it says the MAC is out of range.  I guess the manually set MAC's are of one range and the auto generated MAC's are of another.

What I'm want to do is boot this 64 bit VM to the CD image and reinstall the correct OS but keeping the MAC address.  Does anyone know why it's not seeing the existing hard drive so my installation can continue?

Hope this makes sense.

Thanks

[Rubeck]

If the VM was created from scratch selecting Win2K8R2 as the guest OS a LSI SAS controller will be used by default... Don't think that Win2K3 R2 has a native driver for this... Try change this controller to LSI Paralllel which is the default for Win2K3..

Also setting the MAC address on the vNIC within the guest OS also works in many cases, depending on the app being licensed....

In any case you should configure the correct guest OS type used in the VM settings.. 

/Rubeck

[DingoDuck]

Thanks Rubeck,   I tried that and got a Windows STOP message after the "press any key to boot from the CD" prompt.  I wish I knew what the issue was here as this sounds like a good trick to have in the bag.

That got me to thinking however, and I created a new VM, downloaded the new VM's VMX file and manually changed the MAC adress to the MAC I needed.  I uploaded the VMX file and after a reboot, walaa!

So far, everything looks like it's going to work.

Thanks

Jim