Recovered vmdk from dying esx4.0, copy to 5.5 windows not booting

K

Karandras

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Feb 16, 2001
Messages
1,873
Hi,

So I've been trying to get this working all day. We've had a server with ESXi4.0 mostly crash but I was able to get the VM folders from ESX via SCP. I've copied these into our main ESXi5.5 cluster (the vmdk-flat and vmx files). I can boot the machine but when it tries to boot it comes up with a repair screen for windows.

Googling all of this I found this: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/927392 however when I boot into repair mode windows shows me the drive with 0MB. I'm assuming beause of a controller driver issue? The original VM Hardware version was 7 but I imported at version 9. Could that cause this problem? Is there a way for me to get into the registry and enable something to allow this driver? Anyone run into this before? Any other ideas?

Thanks!
 
did you try to create new vm and just attach vmdk file to it and see if that boots?
 
Awesome. Mounted however now I have "The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable". Is there a FSCHK I can run on this some how?

Trying to access the disk with any windows tools and it just errors with The disk check could not be performed because Windows can't saccess the disk.

Gah, using DiskInternals VMFS Recovery it shows that the MFT is damaged on the copy I took. This is going to pose a big problem. Going to try to take another copy, see if I can get it without being damaged.....grrr.....
 
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try another copy. maybe take the disk out and install it into esxi 5 host that you have. maybe that will work
 
Problem is it's a raid 10, if it was raid 1 that would have been the first thing I would have done. Raid 10 adds a level of complexity. I just don't want to break the array and lose the data. I'm thinking of trying to build esx5.5 on a USB stick, boot that and see if I can access the store. If I can maybe the updated drivers for 5.5 will work nicer with the PERC6 controller possibly allowing me to boot the VMs.

Still letting this d/l first, another 7 hours remaining. If I unthrottle it the connection crashes when it gets to about 7 mb/sec then crashes the connection. Have to transfer 100Gb at about 3Mb/sec to get it properly.

I'm assuming ESX has to be built on the server that it's going to be working on or another one exactly like it? The client's server is r610 and I have a free pe2950 that I could build it on. Do you know if that would work?
 
it should be fine. it should pick up vmfs partition and if its not corrupt use it. if you want to move those drives though you have to have same scsi controller i think.
 
It'll boggle a bit at the network cards and the vmkernel uuid, but that's fine - you're not going to RUN like that, just recover data.
 
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