How to Import existing virtual disk from one VM to another

[Spirit986]

Hi to all.

We have two servers with ESXi 5, HP Proliant and Fujitsu.

The Proliant supports hiperthreading, but the Fujustsu is an older model and does not support. We use to run VMs on both of them.

I made an import of one VM, Win2008R2, from the Proliant server to the Fujitsu. The VM is a 64bit and without hiperthreading support did not start, so I decided to import  one of its virtual hard drives (option Use an existing virtual disk) to another virtual server on the Fujitsu witch runs Win2008.

This is the part where I was suprised to see that the virtual hard drive was recognized as foreign and I could not browse its contents.

The windows has asked me that I need to format the drive before I can use it?

How can I make the drive to be recognized by the other server?

There is an option to use "Import foreign disk" but that will also ask me to format the vdisk.

Any sugestions?

--

EDIT:

Also anything that I can do to browse and extract the vmdk contents will also be usefull

[spravtek]

Hi, welcome to the forums.

Are you trying to import a Dynamic Disk from a Windows 2008 R2 VM into a Windows 2008 VM (so not another R2)?

Normally you should be able to import the foreign disk without formatting it ... But if the versions of Windows are different (and in this case maybe lower), then it might not work.

Can you try and import it into another Windows 2008 R2 VM?

If it isn't a typo of course.

Information of the Dynamic disks is kept on the disk itself, hence it shows up as foreign...

[Spirit986]

I suspected as much that that is because of the "Dinamic Disk".. I guess I will have to import into another WinSrv2008R2 and see if that will work..

Thank you for the sugestion