Hello VMware Community,
I have a critical W2K3 R2 SP2 server (physical) that is being moved to a new building and in the meantime wished to virtualize it and configure it to keep our medical billing software's SQL backbone intact and in production during the physical server's downtime. I had issues originally when trying to convert P2V using the an older version of Converter, then I downloaded/installed the LATEST version I could find, 5.0.1 b 875114. This new version also failed to create the VM w/ the error:
'An error occurred during the conversion: ‘converter.fault.FileIOFault’ --- Log Highlights: 'Unable to clone volume 'C:'.'
After some hunting, I found the solution to that (or so I thought) and defragged the C: and F: drives on the source machine. I was then able to virtualize the running machine and chose to keep the drives the original size (I had chosen minimum size previously). The destination is a Seagate 2TB Ext. HDD enclosure which I then took to the temporary server. I should interject here and mention that I changed the no. of cores from 4 (on source machine) to 2 (on destination virtual machine) and bumped the memory down from 4GB to 2GB (I will potentially be running 1 if not 2 more VMs on the temp server) though I assume this had nothing to do w/ the error I received when I tried to boot the VM in VMware Player 4 (and I DID select that in the options of the "Convert Machine" task beforehand).
The VM failed to boot to a desktop and in DOS-mode said (not exact verbiage):
Unable to load OS, a file is missing or corrupt: ntoskrnl.exe
So I connected the host machine's (temp server) DVD-ROM drive to the VM and tried recovery mode from the W2K3 R2 disk but when I run bootcfg /rebuild I get a message saying to run chkdsk. I do so with the /R argument on the C:\ drive and several hours later get the message it has fixed errors. However, running the bootcfg /rebuild again gives me the same message about running chkdsk. I have searched the physical server and there are various "ntoskrnl.exe" files on there but my question is A) which one do I use (running SP2) and B) can I burn that file to a disk, connect the optical drive to the VM and install it that way or does it HAVE to pull it from the original installation disk? I am presently re-running the task but expect the same result. I was informed by a fellow Network Admin that Clonezilla might be the way to go (shut down the server, clone both drives w/ Clonezilla from bootable USB drive, create a blank VM and use the USB drive as boot media). If using Converter is a lost cause due to some sort of irreparable corruption on the system drive of the source machine, can I expect a different outcome with the Clonezilla method?
Also of note, the C:\ drive is the system drive and it is in a software RAID 1 configuration with another (matching model) HDD of the same size. The F:\ drive is the documents, data, and SQL databases.
Your tips and pointers are greatly appreciated, I'm way out of my depth here and I am the only IT person in the building. I look forward to and thank you in advance for your responses.