VMware Cloud Community
eagleh
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
Jump to solution

Help! error loading operating system

It took me 12 hours to convert a workstation vm (200G) to an ESX vm. Finished 100% with no error. However, when I power it on my ESX host, it says "error loading operation system". The Guest OS is Ubuntu Linux (32-bit). 1vCPU, 1024MB Memory. It was a vm originally on a workstation. Anything I am missing? Please help.

If you found this information useful, please kindly consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!
Reply
0 Kudos
1 Solution

Accepted Solutions
IamTHEvilONE
Immortal
Immortal
Jump to solution

P2V or V2V doesn't make much of a difference. The deal is that you are going from one set of hardware to another, and the Linux OS doesn't know what the changes were.

It's like you ripped an IDE hard drive out of a physical host, copied the data from the IDE Drive to a SCSI Drive, then plugged the SCSI drive into a new physical host.

What needs to be done in the end, is configuring the Linux OS to recognize the new hardware (physical or virtual). And each Linux OS is a little different. This means that hda is going be sda for sake of where the HDD is mounted, and then you have to ensure that there are the drivers for the VMware SCSI installed correctly. Make sure you are using the LSI logic drivers, or most Linux versions will use it.

View solution in original post

Reply
0 Kudos
5 Replies
IamTHEvilONE
Immortal
Immortal
Jump to solution

how did you do the conversion?

Converter won't configure the VM that you are using because it doesn't recognize linux operating systems. Also, ESX only supports SCSI hard drives and Workstation will typically use IDE.

take a look at this: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-5751

eagleh
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
Jump to solution

Thanks. So from the link you gave, they are doing, firstly, P2V (while in my case is V2V); secondly, they are using SCSI (I assume as you suggested). So, in my case, Linux + V2V + SCSI, no way to be able to put on ESX?

If you found this information useful, please kindly consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!
Reply
0 Kudos
IamTHEvilONE
Immortal
Immortal
Jump to solution

P2V or V2V doesn't make much of a difference. The deal is that you are going from one set of hardware to another, and the Linux OS doesn't know what the changes were.

It's like you ripped an IDE hard drive out of a physical host, copied the data from the IDE Drive to a SCSI Drive, then plugged the SCSI drive into a new physical host.

What needs to be done in the end, is configuring the Linux OS to recognize the new hardware (physical or virtual). And each Linux OS is a little different. This means that hda is going be sda for sake of where the HDD is mounted, and then you have to ensure that there are the drivers for the VMware SCSI installed correctly. Make sure you are using the LSI logic drivers, or most Linux versions will use it.

Reply
0 Kudos
kkshirsagar
Contributor
Contributor
Jump to solution

When you try to cloning the machine using, VMware converter it gives 2 options

1> Choose the volume and then create the vmdk

2> Maintain the Disk Size.

Please select the 2nd option i.e Maintain the Disk Size this may result in solving the above error.

Reply
0 Kudos
WIFFC0
Contributor
Contributor
Jump to solution

(For search purposes) Fixed vmware error loading operating system. I realise this post is old but I just had the same problem. I used VMWare converter to convert a Windows 2003 Server it took 7 hours and then threw up this error. My problem it turns out is that my source server was running SATA hard drives and I left the default settings in VMWare converter for "Disk Controller" as "Preserve Source" however when I ran the converter again I changed this setting to LSI Logic SCSI Controller since this is the perferred controller within VMWare. This time the conversion worked perfectly.

Reply
0 Kudos