SSR 2011 One time virtual conversion MBR issue

[Vlad-ASTIS]

Hi All,

I am trying to use SSR 2011 to do a one-time virtual conversion from a cold-boot backup of a physical machine. The conversion from .v2i to .vmdk is fine however, when booting up the VM, it wont boot. Has no MBR. I have to insert a MS Windows Recovery disk and boot up into recovery mode and fixmbr in order for it to boot. Is there an option somewhere to specify to restore the MBR?

I've tried a cold-boot restore of the .v2i directly into the VM and that works without issues.

Thanks in advance,

Vlad

[Markus_Koestler]

Can you hold the shift+ctrl key when starting the conversion and see what happens ?

[criley]

What operating system are you trying to convert?

And is this issue only seen when converting cold backups to VMDK? Have you tried converting a hot backup yet?

[Vlad-ASTIS]

Markus, at what stage do I hold down the shift+ctrl keys? I start the SSR2011 and then select Tasks > One Time Virtual Conversion to start the wizard and select Workstation 6 and then select Filename type source and specify the *.v2i files and proceed from there. At no stage can I select to restore the MBR and mark drive as active (as can be done when doing a cold-boot restore).

Chris, I am trying to P2V an XP and a 2003 Server. I have not tried hot backup as I've been told by VMware techs that it is not the ideal way to do a P2V. Note also that the Volume Shadow Copy has been disabled on the XP due to the use of SOE.

Thanks for the replies so far.

[Markus_Koestler]

Try the keys when you select the conversion task.

[Vlad-ASTIS]

Hi Markus,

I did as you suggested. Held down the Shift+Ctrl and then clicked on the One Time Virtual Conversion Task. However, the converted VMDKs still does not boot. Just get a blank screen with a blinking cursor.

When I mounted the system drive VMDK, it appears to be a valid system drive with the NTDETECT.COM, ntldr and boot.ini files.

Am I meant to see extra options with the Shift+Ctrl keys held down?

TIA,

Vlad

[Markus_Koestler]

Yep, at least it is so when you do a normal recovery of to physical hardware. Hm, then I'm out of luck.

[criley]

Chris, I am trying to P2V an XP and a 2003 Server. I have not tried hot backup as I've been told by VMware techs that it is not the ideal way to do a P2V. Note also that the Volume Shadow Copy has been disabled on the XP due to the use of SOE.

I don't see any reason why you cannot do a hot backup and the convert that. Can you at least test this to see if it makes a difference?

[Vlad-ASTIS]

I think I know what is going on now. Got the Windows 2003 server working now. Don't know what happened previously.

I then tried to create a new VM for the XP (instead of using an existing VMX file). However, when I add the vmdks, they are added as SCSI disks and for obvious reasons, XP wont boot either. I then loaded the VMDKs into UltraEdit and found that they are indeed SCSI disks instead of IDE. When I used the existing VMX file, it specifies the disks as IDE and because the disks are actually SCSI, it wont boot.

Is there a way for SSR's one time virtual conversion  to create IDE disks instead of SCSI disks?

Regards,

Vlad

[Vlad-ASTIS]

Update,

I used vmware-vdiskmanager to convert (using a convoluted process) the SCSI format VMDKs to IDE VMDKs. Created a new VM and added the IDE VMDKs to it. However, it still wont boot.

I am at a loss here.

[Vlad-ASTIS]

Hi All,

Have downloaded an MBR reader that will extract MBRs from VMDKs. The 2003 System drive VMDK has an MBR but the XP System drive VMDK does not at all. I also verified by converting the VMDKs to a single preallocated type and extracted the first 512 bytes (as can be seen in the attached zip file).

The same method was used to back up the XP as the 2003. I even made another backup using server licence instead of workstation licence. It is just strange that the converted disk does not contain the MBR at all.

This is really getting frustrating.

Vlad

[Vlad-ASTIS]

Good news. Problem solved. It turns out I originally restored the images to the physical machine with C and D on the second HDD (multibay) and E on the first HDD (internal) of the laptop. So when SSR backed it up, it did not backup the MBR which was on the second HDD. I restored the original GSS images in the correct order and then did another SSR backup. This time the P2V worked.