[RndTbl] libvirt, vmware, and Windows 2000

[Chris Audet]

@Scott Haven't worked much with Win 2000, thankfully.

Tried to reproduce your problem in my lab by installing Win 2000
Professional on ESXI, adding a bunch of virtual HDDs using FAT or NTFS with
basic or dynamic disks (trying to see if some combination caused it to
fail), downloading the VMDK files, converting to qcow2, and importing into
Proxmox.

However wasn't able to make it past the converting VMDK to qcow2 step.  I
must've messed up somewhere because after importing the disks into Proxmox
I just get a Windows "boot drive inaccessible" error.

Sadly I didn't take many notes while experimenting with all this, but if
you end up finding a solution I'd be very curious to learn it.

The only part that stuck out to me while doing this is that when
initializing new disks on Win 2000 it seemed to default to dynamic disks,
and was trying to build a software raid by default.  I'm not sure if this
would be a factor with your disk conversion - but I can see how if the
disks are configured as a raid but "qemu-img convert" is handling the disks
one at a time it could have strange results.

bash-5.1$ qemu-img convert -p -f vmdk -O qcow2 Chris_Win2000.vmdk
Chris_Win2000.qcow2
(100.00/100%)
bash-5.1$ qemu-img convert -p -f vmdk -O qcow2 Chris_Win2000_1.vmdk
Chris_Win2000_1.qcow2
(100.00/100%)
bash-5.1$ qemu-img convert -p -f vmdk -O qcow2 Chris_Win2000_2.vmdk
Chris_Win2000_2.qcow2
(100.00/100%)
bash-5.1$ qemu-img convert -p -f vmdk -O qcow2 Chris_Win2000_3.vmdk
Chris_Win2000_3.qcow2
(100.00/100%)

root at MGV7091:~# qm importdisk 102 Chris_Win2000.qcow2 local-lvm
root at MGV7091:~# qm importdisk 102 Chris_Win2000_1.qcow2 local-lvm
root at MGV7091:~# qm importdisk 102 Chris_Win2000_2.qcow2 local-lvm
root at MGV7091:~# qm importdisk 102 Chris_Win2000_3.qcow2 local-lvm

https://ostechnix.com/import-qcow2-into-proxmox/
https://docs.openstack.org/image-guide/convert-images.html

On Tue, Jan 31, 2023 at 12:47 PM Scott Toderash <
scott at 100percenthelpdesk.com> wrote:

> If the subject line doesn't scare you then maybe you can help me out
> with this one. Windows 2000 is its own punishment at this point, but
> it's part of the mission in this case.
>
> I have a working Windows 2000 server running on VMWare esxi. I
> downloaded the image as a vmdk file and attempted to import it into my
> Linux system as a KVM image. It mostly works.
>
> I did this successfully with 2 other machines that were Windows 2012R2
> from the same source and same destination. Those work.
>
> W2k is having issues because it has C: E: and F: but only C: is
> recognized when I boot it up in the new environment. It shows that E:
> exists but it believes that it is corrupted.
>
> There are probably some parameters that I don't know about that I need
> to pass in order to make this work.
>
> The general process was download the vmdk image, use "qemu-img convert"
> to make a raw file and then try to boot that. I tried using virt-install
> and I tried some other manual config methods but this is as far as I
> have been able to get.
>
> Does anyone here have experience with this sort of scenario?
>
>
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