I am trying to convert a physical server to a virtual one. I know that there are tools for this, but they either cost a lot or have extreme requirements.
I have tried to use Norton Ghost to make a copy of the disk, then restore that copy inside a VM. I made this work, but after I restore it, Windows won't boot. I can boot to a PE disk and verify that the file system is intact, but I think the hard disk drivers for Windows are wrong. The physical server was a Dell PowerEdge 1950 with a SCSI PowerEdge RAID Controller (PERC) 6 card.
Is there a way to add the VM's hard disk drivers to the drive from a Windows PE disk, without booting into Windows? I am using Virtual Server 2005.
I know that I can do it on the physical machine before I take the image, but it is a production machine that I don't want to take a chance with.
EDIT 1: Virtual Server 2005 Migration Toolkit has extreme requirements, because it needs ADS installed. The only time I sucessfully used it I had to build a whole temporary test network around it (a big hassle). There is also System Center's VMMC (very expensive).
When I try to boot the new VM, I see the POST screen, and if I have a bootable CD loaded it will boot to the CD. If not, then the CPU usage drops to 0 and the VM locks up. I have tried to update the hal.dll
in the system32
folder, but that didn't fix it.
I think that I need to disable the SCSI driver from the 1950 that is trying to get loaded.
The VM/physical machine that I am converting is running Windows 2003.