VM Won't Boot After Migration to ESXi v4

[FACWare]

I recently migrated all my VMs from Hyper-V to a new ESXi v4 Server using Converter. Out of the 8 VMs I converted, 2 of them won't boot and are experiencing the same issue. When they power up, they show the VMWare POST screen and then sit at a blank screen with a blinking cursor. Has anyone seen this before?

Some additional facts:

- The 2 that are not booting are both of the Windows Server 2003 R2 VMs. All the other servers that worked were Windows Server 2008.

- Doing a repair with FIXMBR and FIXBOOT did not work while I verified that all data is available from within the Recovery Console booting off the DVD.

- Going through all the steps in KB1006296 did not work.

- Removing and adding back the virtual disks did not help.

- I've search many threads where many people are seeing issues like this but none with any help.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Chris

[AndreTheGiant]

Seems that the drivers of the boot disk are wrong.

Try to change the controller of those VMs to IDE disk.

Have you installed the VMware Tools during the convertion?

Andre

[danm66]

Andrei's almost right. The usual issue is that the VM is still thinking it is using IDE controller for the hard disk controller, but ESX doesn't support IDE disk controller for the hard drive. I would recommend you try running the standalone converter against the vm's again and instead of cloning choose configure. This will allow you to change the controller type to lsi logic and inject the drivers into the VM.

[FACWare]

Thanks for the replies!

I was thinking along the same direction but the original machines no longer exist becuase I only have one server. I know this wasn't the smartest thing to do...just didn't have more hardware.

Any way to change the controller after the conversion?

[AndreTheGiant]

You can use again converter to try a V2V conversion.

Try to install VMware Tools.

Or try to change the disk to IDE disk

Andre

[danm66 · Accepted solution]

With converter standalone, you have two buttons at the top...Convert Machine and Configure Machine. Convert Machine does what it says, starts a conversion process, but Configure Machine runs the configuration process (the same thing that happens in the last 5% of the conversion process) to make the guest compatible with running in a virtual environment (i.e. changes the drive controller to whatever you specified and installs the drivers and entries in the registry so that the correct drivers load, etc..)

So, you might be able to get away with just running through a reconfigure of the VM's.

[FACWare]

Thanks Guys!

Danm66 was right on with both responses and AndreTheGiant was close. I tried running all the suggestions and in the end it turned out that it breaks with an IDE controller and only works with an LSI controller. I performed both the configure and convert and both yielded the same results with the configure taking 10x less time.

I truely appreciate the support and wanted to respond since this community rocks! :smileyshocked:)

[scottlindner]

FACwire,

Could you explain exactly what you did? I tried following this and do not see any way to change the drive from IDE to LSI.

Scott