Unable to determine Guest OS

I noticed that several of my fellow techies seemed to be having this same issue. I just wanted to share my experience on how I resolved the issue.

I was onsite this week completing several P2V migrations. I converted two older Dell 4400 servers and the servers converted without any issue. The Dell 2900 server had an issue during the P2V process. I completed all of the migrations using the Cold Clone VMware converter found on VMware's website. The Dell 2900 received the following error message “unable to find the guest OS”.

I tried to convert the server using the regular VMware Converter. The server completed the migration but still had an issue. I tried to power on the server and received another error message on the virtual machine. The error message was the following “unable to find a disk” on the virtual machine.

I did the following to resolve the issue. The server needed to have the raid controller and SATA backplane updated to bring this issue to closure. I tried converting the Dell 2900 after updating the SATA controller with the Cold Clone. The server converted successfully and was able to boot properly into Windows.

My conclusion is the following the Dell 2900 server had an issue hardware related that prevent the P2V process. The P2v conversion whether with the Cold Clone CD or regular VMware Converter couldn’t be completed properly. I would recommend updating the bios etc.