I realized this is a very old post, and thank you for the information inoyat, I appreciate all the work you put into it. I have followed the instructions, and I am able to boot off of a rescue cd, then moun the hard drive, and see the files from the converted openvz machine, I'm using a single esxi 6.7 based VM, with centos 6 32 bit (i686) as that was the type of the old vm. I've been able to chroot to the old drive, and I can get online, and I can use yum to install packages in the chrooted environment.
I have done these steps after conversion:
1. Booted from Centos 6.8 live cd
2. mkdir /tmp/speed
3. mount /dev/sda1 /tmp/speed
4. chroot /tmp/speed
5. yum install kernel, grub (and dependencies)
Inside of /boot I have:
vmlinux-2.6.32-754.30.2.el6.i686
initramfs-2.6.32-754.30.2.el6.i686.img
/boot/grub/grub.conf:
------------
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,1)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Centos 6.8 i686
root(hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinux-6.2.32-642.el6.i686 ro root=/dev/sda1 rhgb noqiet
initrd /boot/initramfs/2.6.32-754.30.2.el6.i686.img
------
In the chrooted environment when I look at /dev there is no sda1, there's just /dev/simfs - the same file structure as what existed on the origional machine
/etc/fstab has this:
------------------------------------------------------------
/dev/sda1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
------------------------------------------------------------
/etc/inittab has this:
-----------------------------------------------------------
id:3:initdefault:
1:2345:respawn:/sbn/mingetty tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbn/mingetty tty2
3:2345:respawn:/sbn/mingetty tty3
4:2345:respawn:/sbn/mingetty tty4
5:2345:respawn:/sbn/mingetty tty5
6:2345:respawn:/sbn/mingetty tty6
-----------------------------------------------------
When I boot up the guest I get this:
Booting from local disk ...
Network boot form VMware VMXNET3
PXE-EC8: !PXE structure was not found in UNDI driver code segment
PXE-MOF: Exiting Intel PXE Rom.
Operating system not found
I've tried changing the scsi controller to all options under editing machine settings, to all the options that hasn't made a difference.
I can't tell if the guest VM is not seeing the hard drive at all, or if it is seeing the drive and cannot boot from it because there's a problem with grub or the partition or something.
When I try to do grub-install /dev/simfs, I get: no suitable drive was found in the generated device map. The same message comes up for /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda
Any help would greatly be appreciated.
Chris