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dhawthrone
Contributor
Contributor
‎01-31-2008 07:35 AM

Windows 2003 VM hangs at boot

VI3.5.0 Build 64607.

I converted an IBM Blade server booting from SAN to a VM. It booted up once but froze at the windows login prompt. Now I cannot even get it that far, it boots to the Windows logo and hangs. I'm sure its hardware, but don't know where to start. Disconnected the floppy, cd-rom, NIC's to avail. Any suggestions?

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wila
Immortal
Immortal
‎02-01-2008 02:15 AM

can you still boot into safe mode?

If you can, then go and look around for obsolete hardware (see bottom half of the vmware converter page at vmware-land.com if you need steps for that) and in addition remove any hardware agent that is now obsolete.

If not then it is probably easiest to clone the VM and start a repair install on the clone to see if that fixes it.

--

Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
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abaum
Hot Shot
Hot Shot
‎02-01-2008 10:33 AM

We had a similar problem going from a an HP server to vm. Turned out to be the HP Mgmt services. I went back the physical box, disabled them, reran P2V and it now works fine. Seems that some of the new HP mgmt agents just suck up so much CPU that it appears the guest has frozen.

adam

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dhawthrone
Contributor
Contributor
‎02-01-2008 11:38 AM

I was able to get into the safe mode and the machine hung up loading acpitabl.dat. That turned out to be a known issue with Windows 2003 Server SP1, and I had to go the recovery console and manually uninstall it, booted up fine afterwards.

Thanks for the replies.

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Wolfi3
Contributor
Contributor
‎08-01-2009 09:47 AM

Just wanted to check if anyone have a resolution for this problem as we just experienced the acpitabl.dat after converting a win 2003 ent server with exchange 2003 install.

Updated the bios and perc 5/i to most recent on the PE 2900 as was thinking this was causing the issue.

After that tried booting of windows cd to do a fixmbr and fixboot. No HELP>>>

Tried doing a repair with windows disk. No HELP>>>

Tried every possible way of converting. (probably 10times in a day) No HELP>>>

Thought it was a dynamic disk, so moved the exchange database local again and deleted dynamic disk. No HELP>>>

Wanted to do a cold convert, but looks like the bootable cold boot cd does not have drivers for the scisi..

We are giving up...

CT

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