P2V converter - anyone used it?

[Sirbendy]

We're currently trying to VM most things here, and we're trying to move a server over using VMWare P2V converter 3.0.3 (new one). I used an older version that went through the wizard fine, as does this one..however, when you click the final button to make it start, it dies. Totally.

Is there some knack we're missing here? It's making me curse about as much as the sharepoint server I'm configuring..

Thanks in advance..

[sparkeh]

I have experienced something similar.
What happens when you try to start the machine?

In my case it it locked the machine up for a long time. For a while I thought it was crashing the machine it was running on, but by chance one day I left it and it finally started the VM up. It was just taking ages.

Worked fine on an older version.

[CyberNerd]

The last server I migrated was with v 3.01, i don't recall any knack but I recall the log files are helpful in diagnosis

[Sirbendy]

We just installed the P2V app, ran through the wizard, then it vanished from the task manager and existence! Stupid thing.

It seems happier to be run on 1 machine, and to P2V a machine that's network linked to that machine it's running on..so that's that we're doing.

2 hours remaining..then that's another server virtualised.

[ajbritton]

I P2Ved my old Win2K PC when I got a spanking new quad-core XP machine. The VM version is actually quicker!

I did have trouble getting it to work though. The P2V process fell over at 97% and would not complete. It was something to do with disk drivers. I had to manually replace the ATAPI.SYS file in the virtual image with the VMWare disk driver (VMSCSI.SYS) to enable it to boot. There was a bit more fiddling required to get the VMWare tools properley installed and away it went. This article (VMWare: Migrating Windows XP and 2000 to a Virtual Machine | Diary Products - Hannes Schmidt) was what got me through it.

Not sure if you are having the same problem, but I thought this might be useful to point out anyway.

[tmcd35]

The P2V tool seems a bit hit and miss here. Sometimes it works great others it'll bomb out at 1%. We've found that Norton Ghost works just as well, restore a ghost image to a virtual machine. We generally chop and change between the two options when migrating machines.