Windows 2000 Woes

[MicroMuncher]

I have had much frustration trying to virtualize my office. Part of my frustration has been host configuration and preparation pre-conversion, but it continues post conversion.

I've got 3 Windows 2000 Pro and 1 Windows 2000 Server SP4 instances that have all "Inaccessable Boot Device" issues. They all come from different machines (in the sense of different motherboard manufacturers, etc.); but there seems to be a common thread which is the primary Windows install is on the second partition of a logical drive. (The reason why is that these were all upgrades of Windows 98, Windows NT4, etc. where the first OS was left intact on the primary partition.)

I believe I followed the instructions; but I seem to have followed a path that has made things "worse" regarding their configuration. I booted my original W2K from CD to do a repair to try address the hal and driver issues. It was not successful (in that I still got IBD.) So I ran a full repair, of which I believe the last part of the three steps is to fix the MBR. After that, I cannot get past boot loader (in that it looks like it doesn't load at all.) I tried to replace ntldr etc with no change - so I stare at the cursor and scratch my head about what to do next.

I have not had any trouble with XP virtualization. But before I try repair any of my other W2K installs, does anyone have similiar experience and/or fix advice? (Note the IDE type makes no difference, nor any of the virtual CPU settings. It seems to be solely a guest configuration issue.)

I can still mount those images and disks, and chkdsk says they're okay. They were all originally converted with VMWare Converter.

Thanks for any advice;

p.s. I did have one partially work; one W2K instance seemed to work but the page file was on a different partition from boot so it failed after virtualization; fixing this issue, mysteriously the IBD appeared, that makes no sense as I didn't seem to touch anything around ide/disk driver - just modified the registry for the page file.

[vbox4me2]

Your best bet is to install a fresh version and overwrite it with a ntbackup from you real machine.

[MarkCranness]

UBCD for Windows has various boot repair tools which may help (rebuild MBR, fix VBR BIOS Parameter Block etc.)

My own experience was a 'Disk read error' caused by bad BPB geometry, fixed using bootbuild.exe, see here:
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic. ... 95#p107595

I recently saw a new P2V product, which claims to adjust the image so that it will run better in the VM: VMLite MyOldPCs:
http://www.vmlite.com/index.php/product ... ser-manual
"Great care has been taken to make sure that the resulting virtual machine can boot from as many virtual machine software as possible. After conversion is complete, MyOldPCs modifies the registry and some system files from your virtual disks to make the converted virtual machine to be bootable."
Perhaps that might have better results than VMware Converter?

[MicroMuncher]

I got much further ahead;
1) something changed my boot.ini partion from 2 to 1 (fixed)
2) something corrupted my ntldr (had a trap error; think the active partition flag changed)
3) I had my page file on a different disk than the boot disk; fixed via modifying the registry for PagingFiles

Now I can get to a logon screen, but after I logon, the screen goes black, then after a while kicks me back to the logon screen.

Anyone?

I cannot boot in VGA or SafeMode still (looks like a keyboard related bluescreen).

My next guess is to zap any non-standard video driver I see.

[vbox4me2]

Use the console mode from the CD to rename drivers until it boots in safemode.

[MicroMuncher]

tx as much as i look forward to that task;
perhaps installing bvox guest drivers manually
would help but i did't see doc on how to; im
thinking of a clean room install and compare to see
what drivers and registry should look like

[MicroMuncher]

I had numerous hurdles; but I got my most important W2K machine operational.

1) repair didn't really repair; the problems I had after doing a repair got worse, and from what I can tell, I may not have needed to have done a repair but...
2) something odd happened during repair where it tagged the boot partion as inactive, I needed to install ntldr etc on what it thought was the active partition
3) i did get past the IBD by disabling all existing, foreign drivers (that wouldn't be used anyway, like the UDF, NICs, etc) - and this allowed me to boot in safe mode too
3) vmware converted didn't remapped my drives correctly; so when I logged on it just kicked me back to the logon screen after a bit - turns out it couldn't find userinit, so I removed the fully qualified path to it in the registry, that allowed me to log on, and then I went back and re-mapped the drives to what they were

I learned a few things. 1) never remap anything (aka never use vmware converter), 2) use sysinternals disk2vpd because it gives detailed error messages that you can understand (aka vmware wasn't helpful), 3) disable all the junk before you convert (I had cleaned the registry because vmware converter failed at the 97% mark a few times, but it was not enough), 4) good tools to browse event logs on other boot partitions are hard to find (I found one that allowed me to triage the driver issues)