Physical-to-VM Conversion causes Blue Screen loop on Dell comptuers

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I encountered this problem today when I tried to convert 2 Dell PCs into VMware virtual machines. The conversion run fine without any errors at all, but the new VMs won't boot up properly. I'd get the Windows 7 blue-screen-of-death saying something about disks being changed (too fast to read through), followed by a reboot and back to the blue screen again.

The source machines were both Dell Optiplex 990 PCs and upon checking the settings, I quickly noticed that the hard disks on the VMs are IDEs. I'm certain that my Dells have SATA, so I knew exactly where the problem was. I remember seeing this same problem with physical machines when SATA was new. Windows would crash if you changed to SATA drives and don't update the BIOS setting to "compatibility mode."



The thing that would've prevented this from happening was if I set the correct controller type on the VMWare Converter wizard. Instead, I went with all the default options and VMWare uses IDE if there's no controller type selected.

Now, short of re-converting (which takes hours), I found this neat trick to change the IDE harddisk into SCSI. Here are the steps:

  1. SSH into the VM host
  2. go the the folder there the vmdk file is hosted.
    # cd /vmfs/volumes/{datastore name}/{VM name}
    Tip: if the either the datastore of VM name has a space, you can enclose the name inside double-quote (ie, "My VM 1")
  3. Edit the vmdk file:   #vi filename.vmdk
  4. Look for the line that says ddb.adapterType = "ide"
  5. Change that to ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic"
  6. Save the file by pressing Esc then  :wq
  7. Exit the SSH session
  8. Open up VMSphere Client and edit the Settings of the VM
  9. Select the IDE Hard Disk and click Remove. On the options, make sure the first one (Remove from virtual machine) is selected. DO NOT choose delete files from disk.
  10. Click OK to save the changes
  11. Once completed, go back to Edit Settings
  12. Add a new Hard Disk, select "Use an existing virtual disk", then click Next
  13. Browse and select the VMDK file that you just edited, click Next
  14. On the Virtual Device Node, make sure it says "SCSI (0:0)" then click Next
  15. It will add a new SCSI disk and controller to your VM
  16. Click OK to save the settings
I tried booting up the VM after but I got a new error message. Something about having a Slave IDE without a Master. It was because I had a CD/DVD drive on IDE as well. Going back to Edit Settings,  I just had to change my CD/DVD drive's Virtual Device Node from IDE (0:1) to IDE (0:0) thus making it master.

Once this is completed, my VMs booted smoothly to Windows 7. All I had to do next was install VMWare Tools.

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