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csanii
Contributor
Contributor

VMplayer won't boot vCenter created image - Help needed

I keep getting a bluescreen message that flashes on the screen when trying to boot the WinXP image created by vCenter.

The msg says "If this is your 1st tiime seeing this stop error screen restart your computer. If the screen appears again follow these steps:

Check for viruses on your computer. Remove any newly installed harddrive controllers. Check your hard drive to make sure it is properly configured and terminated. Run CHKDSK /F to check for hard drive corruption and then restart your computer.

Technical information:

*** STOP: 0x0000007B (0xF8950528, 0xC0000034,0x00000000,0x00000000)"

This shows up for less than a second. I had to video record it to actually be able to read the msg.

Is there a way to slow the msg display down?

Anyways this is what i had done:

1) Booted my WinXP machine

2) Installed VMware Player v3.1.4-build385536

3) Installed VMware vCenter Converter Standalone v4.3.0-build292238

4) Ran the converter, selected Powered On machine, local machine, VMware workstation, VMware Workstation v7.0.x.

5) I selected only the boot drive and set the memory to 512MB and the NIC as NAT

6) I exited the converter once the image creation was done

7) Started VMware Player, selected my OS image and booted

😎 The system starts to boot then the error msg pops up, disappears and goes to the normal Windows failed to boot last time screen. I have tried all the boot modes - Safe Mode with/without Networking, etc. All yield the same results.

I have searched the net and others seem to have gotten this to work...did I miss a step somewhere?

Should I be running the image creation in Safe Mode?

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RDPetruska
Leadership
Leadership

Creating the image/vm is only the first step.  You need to run Converter again and do the second step - reconfiguring the image.  The STOP 7B error is because the VM cannot find the hard disk controller driver, as it still thinks it is running the physical hardware, and needs the VMware drivers loaded instead.

csanii
Contributor
Contributor

Well I definitely missed the reconfigure step.

Funny all the docs I read never mentioned that part....

I downloaded sysprep for WInXP from Microsoft and installed the files into:

c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware vCenter Converter Standalone\sysprep\xp\

I then ran the setupmgr tool and it created a sysprep.ini file

I then ran the VMware converter tool again and selected Configure Machine with install VMware tools.

I answered the questions and it did the update but I still get the 7B error.

I didn't see anywhere where it said about the harddrive drivers.

Is there another step I missed?

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

Basically there's no real need to convert an ESXi image to run in in VMware Workstation/Player. All you need to do is to download the files and modify the network settings. However, I guess the virtual disk controller did not get converted correctly. Please double check which controller was used on the ESXi host (usually Buslogic or IDE) and then verify it's the same one in the converted machine (you may check this in the vmx file).

André

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csanii
Contributor
Contributor

I disabled the SCSI references and ensured the IDE ones were enabled in the file....still blue screen 7B error.

Where/when do the drivers get swapped for the VMware disk drivers?

The conversion gives no errors and makes my image file.

I do the reconfigure but I see no options regarding the disk drivers there.

Either I am missing an obvious step or this is more complicated than it really should be....

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

In step 3 in the converter, under "Devices" you can select the disk controller for the target virtual machine. The issue you see has been reported a couple of times with different converter versions. Maybe you want to give version 5 (beta) of the VMware Converter a try?

http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/beta/public_converter_50

André

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