Win10 64bit VM won't boot - OVF conversion from VMware Fusion

[AdgeDefiant]

Hi All,

I'm experiencing 'Fatal Error: No bootable medium found! System Halted.' after converting .vmwarevm file to ovf using the ovftool, any help would be greatly appreciated.

Some history; I been using Windows 10 via bootcamp for sometime now and require this to be moved for workflow reasons, I imported/created new vm out of bootcamp partion in vmware fusion (Hopefully this is not the problem), the vm works fine in fusion but I now need to convert this vm to virtualbox as a matter of urgency, probably be quicker to rebuild from scratch in virtualbox but I need to understand the issue here for future reference... I have searched the forums here but cannot find the correct resource to help. I'm running MacBook Pro late 2017 (without touchbar thankfully), Mojave 10.14.5 & virtualbox 6.0.8 r130520 (Qt5.6.3).

Converted VM to OVF with this command:

./ovftool /Volumes/LaCie/Virtual\ Machines/Boot\ Camp\ \(Imported\).vmwarevm/Boot\ Camp\ \(Imported\).vmx /Volumes/LaCie/Virtual\ Machines/VirtualBox/Win\ 10\ 64bit.ovf

Imported fine with no errors on start, run directly into this problem, I have tried removing storage controllers & reassinging disk using different attributes and controller setting to no avail.

Please advise?

Many thanks
Adge

[socratis]

I recently had a similar discussion with a user in IRC. Turned out that it was the 'ovftool' that was causing incompatible OVAs/OVFs. Check your options, as I don't have the 'ovftool' myself.

Also, the "FATAL: Could not read from the boot medium! System halted." message is from a VM that's booting with the BIOS option. A Bootcamp installation however boots with the Apple EFI option. What's your setting in VM Settings » System » Extended Features?

[AdgeDefiant]

Hi Socratis,

Thanks for you assistance on this.

I did check options in the ovftool but I couldn't ascertain what options would fix my issue. I've looked into externded features and 'enable I/O APIC' is the only thing that is checked, I did however check 'enable efi' which took me into a bios like feature for which I made changes but it still didn't work, same error on save/exit.

I have noticed the ovftool produces a vmdk which is considerably smaller then the source .vmwarewm file after conversion... Do you know of any posts regarding OVF conversion relating to your discussion on IRC? Maybe this is the answer.

Thanks once agian for your help.

[socratis]

Do you know of any posts regarding OVF conversion relating to your discussion on IRC?

No, and that's why I hate IRC for things like that; no long-term memory.

I'm not sure I can help you anymore with this, because I've never used 'ovftool', maybe someone that has can help you out...

[AdgeDefiant]

Thanks for your help anyhow... I've decided to build from scratch within virualbox, a bit of a pain but it's the way forward.

Thanks once again.

[mpack]

I have noticed the ovftool produces a vmdk which is considerably smaller then the source .vmwarewm file after conversion

Yes, VMDK files included in an OVF/OVA are "stream compressed", which is why you should always run them through an import tool and never try to use them directly in a VM.

VMDK is a whole family of formats, there are many variants all of which use the vmdk extension. One should resist the Windows bias which is to assume that files with a certain file extension all have the same format (that isn't even true on Windows any more - the extension is only an hint).

Your "no bootable medium found" is IMHO almost certainly caused by mounting a GPT formatted hard disk image in a VirtualBox VM configured to use the legacy MBR BIOS. The VirtualBox MBR BIOS doesn't recognize GPT partitioning, so have to enable the EFI BIOS for that.