1:00 AM
Paul B
The other day a couple of my company’s dev team decided they wanted to re-image their laptops. Before they did though, they wanted to created a virtual image of their machines in VMWare. This way, they could refer back to the stuff on their old laptop images until they got everything working spiffy enough in their newly installed system. Sounded like a good idea right?
No problem I tell these guys, we can do what we call in the business as a P2V, or a Physical to Virtual conversion. VMWare has a tool called the Converter Standalone Client that will let you convert a running computer to a Virtual machine in no time!
Ok, that part was easy, but after it converted I powered the machine on and staring at me in the face was a lovely message saying:
Error loading operating system
How nice! The original computers were running Windows Server 2008. Looking online I saw a bunch of similar situations where this happened when someone tried to P2V a Linux machine. To fix it the admins had to re-install Grub. That got me thinking, I probably had a corrupt Master Boot Record on my hands.
To fix I, I grabbed my trusty Windows Server 2008 Install DVD, and booted the VM up to it. I selected the option to repair Windows and then I selected the command prompt option.
From there I changed directory to D:\boot and ran the following command:
bootsect /nt60 c: /mbr
After that was finished, I rebooted and the VM loaded Windows without any more problems!
Have you experienced a similar situation? Did you solve it differently? Let me know in the comments.
