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Rob Sobers
Asked: 2009-07-09 05:16:34 +0800 CST

Problem booting virtual machine after converting VMDK to VHD

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I used the VMWare VCenter Converter Standalone Client to convert a physical drive on my old PC to a virtual drive. The conversion worked fine and I ended up with a valid VMDK file. Next, I wanted to convert the VMDK to a VHD for use with Microsoft Virtual PC, since that's what I use on my new box. I used WinImage for the conversion and that worked fine, too. I can access the files from the virtual drive through WinImage.

However, when I create a new virtual machine using Virtual PC and add the existing VHD file, the machine doesn't boot. The initial boot screen flashes with the amount of RAM and then the screen goes black. If I turn off the VM and reboot in safe mode I can see the drivers being loaded until eventually it gets to crcdisk.sys and hangs indefinitely.

Any ideas how to fix this? I'm not opposed to starting over from scratch if there's another method to turn my physical machine into a Virtual PC VM.

Thanks!

EDIT - I should add that the virtual drive is a system boot drive and not a secondary drive.

EDIT - I tried booting from the install CD and doing a repair. The result was that the system could not be repaired due to a "driver error."

virtualization vmware-vcenter virtual-machines

8 Answers

  1. If your old PC uses an EIDE (possibly also SATA) disk you can probably just snapshot it and restore the snapshot to a blank VM disk and the VM should boot. See www.drivesnapshot.de for my favourite (free evaluation!) snapshot tool.

    JR

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  2. Make sure to use the latest version of the VMware converter tool, I believe that the current version is v4.03. I've always found that newer versions converted better. Stands to reason, I guess...

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  3. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314082

    This should solve your problem. Basically, even if your windows supports IDE drives, if it was installed on anything else, the IDE drivers aren't used. In order to set them up, you need to follow the article

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  4. Most likely your boot device isn't configured properly in the registry to allow the system to boot.

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  5. Check the disk type under Vmware. It could have been converted to a Scsi disk - for which virtual PC doesn't have a driver. You may need to revirtualize the original disk but choose to convert it to an IDE disk.

    If this is the cause, a simple repair of the install using the windows install disk should correct disk driver access problems.

    Ian

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  6. Have you tried booting the VM with the Windows installation CD and running a repair on the OS that it finds?

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  7. have you used disk2vhd from sysinternals. The only real limitation is the os boot disk should be less then 128gigs!

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  8. Tried to convert a physical windows vista home 32 bit machine using VMWare Converter Standalone 5.0. It did not boot. What worked for me: Creating the conversion is crucial, for the hard drive settings in particular, . For ME, I had to select IDE. (but other people had the opposite, example: In the VMWare Converter job task, rather than choosing the "Preserve Source" or the "IDE" -- I choose the "SCSI LSI Logic" .)

    Also make sure you pick all the options at the end to "Reconfigure" the OS,: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0xPnZbi2QtQ/S0DRRm6MQcI/AAAAAAAAlJ0/43bwjYCmjJ4/s0/fixed_vmware_converter_fails_0x0000007B_0xFFFFFA60005AF9D0.jpg Dont bother to do the "Synchronize" tab, it may just mess it up.

    After this completes successfully (no errors), import the .VMX into Vmware and check the settings. IF it still didnt work, here is where "IDE" comes into play to help, when the hard disk controller created as IDE, when booting even if you get a Blue Screen STOP error (0x0000007b) you can fix it manually. To do so, you should run a program such as fix_hdc (in my case it was on an old Hiren Boot CD under Start -> Programs -> Registry Tools -> Fix_hdc -> Fix hard disk controller. ) There seem to be similar programs out there called MergeIDE and FixIDE that do the same thing. You will need a bootable CD to run these. Hopefully you can manage that.

    Note: about "BCD" - If the computer is simple with 1 drive and 1 partition, your BCD should not be messed up so I suggest dont waste time with that unless you for sure think it got messed up. (Also it would give different errors and error out different places in the boot process. If you see the graphical progress bar, its not that. It would error on some text saying \winload.exe or something).

    Good luck!

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