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gary
Asked: 2010-07-16 05:20:27 +0800 CST

Hyper-V Boot failure on VHD made with Acronis?

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hoping someone can advise on my problem, I am running Hyper-V core and trying to create my first VM for testing purposes. Using Acronis True Image echo server with UR I converted a Seerver 2000 tib to VHD. I then copied this across to the Hyper-V local drive and created a new VM pointing the hard drive to the vhd image.

When I boot this up all I get is "Boot failure. Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot media in selected Boot device". The original server had SCSI disks, the Hyper-V server doesn't, but I have ensured that it boots from an IDE disk and that it is in fact booting from that not the CD.

I can only imagine this is caused by the SCSI disks on VHD but cannot for the life of me work out how to fix, I have several of these I need to do so starting to worry now!

I can confirm that when I did this from tib to vmdk it worked first time using VMware on a laptop.

Any help very much appreciated.

Gary

hyper-v vhd acronis

2 Answers

  1. Your VM has the wrong Boot Device drivers (and possibly HAL), on Win5.1 this will come up as a STOP 7B.

    Injecting the correct drivers is a bit of a hassle after the fact. MS has an article on fixing this in XP (it's basically the exact same thing in 2K).

    It boils down to:

    • Mount the VHD on a Win7 or similar machine.
    • Load the registry hives, merge the driver information, unload.
    • Inject the driver files (there's only a few, like 5 files).
    • Unmount the VHD

    Note - Doing a P2V on a Win2K server is going to be pretty rough. That's an 11 year old OS. You're way past time to ditch it and upgrade to something newer.

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  2. As Chris S said, Windows is quite likely to not be able to boot after a P2V, due to the (virtual) disk controller for the system disk being different from what it would expect after it was last shut down; this is generally fixed by loading the proper drivers in the original system before P2Ving it, or by mangling with it afterwards by mounting the virtual disk on a running machine.

    However, the error message you're getting is "Boot failure. Reboot and Select proper Boot device", which is the VM BIOS's way to tell you that the disk doesn't look bootable at all; so this looks more like a problem with the disk's MBR and/or partition table.

    Was the physical disk of the original server partitioned? Did it by chance have a hidden "system" partition (this was very often the case with old servers)? Did you bring along all existing partitions during the P2V process, or did you meddle with the partitioning?

    You could have ended up with a virtual disk with a different partition layout than the original one, which may be unable to boot due to one or more of the following:

    • No/bad MBR
    • Wrong active partition selected
    • No valid boot sector on the Windows partition

    This should be fixed before anything else. Then, if Windows tries to boot and gives you a blue screen, you should go and fix the controller driver issues it will very likely have.

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