A customer has a non-critical HP server that they would like to P2V. It is installed with 2 x SATA disks without a SATA RAID controller, runs Windows Server 2003 and uses software RAID 1 mirror over the two disks which are set as dynamic. On top of this, the mirrored disks are split into two logical partitions, C: and D:.
Breaking the mirror and performing a hot P2V using VMware Converter 4.0 Standalone, with the two volumes being P2V'd into two separate .VMDK files fails at 95% during the reconfiguration phase.
If you receive a failure at 95%, it just means that the reconfiguration has failed due to VMware Converter not being able to find the system partition, that actual data copy has successfully completed and the data is intact. Obviously the virtual machine will not boot so how can we fix this?
The solution:
- Boot the virtual machine, select F2 to go into the virtual machine's BIOS and make sure that the VM is booting from the correct virtual disk.
- Boot the machine into a disk management software like Acronis Disk Director Suite or similar and convert the partitions from logical to primary partitions and then select the C: partition as the active partition.
The virtual machine will now boot successfully.
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