Error loading operating system

seanweath

New Member
Oct 20, 2010
9
0
1
I have been trying to migrate some existing VMware vm's to Proxmox; some have worked whilst others display the bios error "Error loading operating system". To transfer them I cloned the original vm under VMware Workstation (non-linked clone) so as to get a single .vmdk file, which I transfered to the Proxmox box using a samba share. After converting the .vmdk to a raw file using "qemu-img convert". Booting from a Windows XP setup disk I run system repair on the disk (which appears to work perfectly in both cases) and then try when setup reboots I get the error. The difference between the vm's that work and dont seems to be the size of the virtual disk; the ones that work are 16GB system disk whilst the one that fails is 40GB. The ones with smaller (16GB) disks both work fine and their performance using virtio for disk and network IO is fantastic. I have tried with and without the VMware tools installed to no avail. Anyone any ideas?
 
I would add that I currently have 2 Windows 2003 Server instances running under Proxmox, as well as 2 Windows XP instances I use for testing, and a copy of Debian 5 running OpenStore, all of which run perfectly. Having tried to setup ESXi server on the same host (and failed, due to the 3Ware 9650SE raid card - which works perfectly under Debian) I would like to congratulate the Proxmox team on having one of the best virtualisation products I have used. :)
 
No, I used "qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O raw -o size=24G WindowsXP.vmdk WindowsXP.raw" under debian (the Proxmox host machine). I used the -o option to try and reduce the size of the disk but that did not work. It is the same process I used to convert some other virtual machines and they are working fine (but their system disk is only 16GB).
 
post your pveversion -v. will try to reproduce the issue.
 
pve-manager: 1.6-5 (pve-manager/1.6/5261)
running kernel: 2.6.32-4-pve
proxmox-ve-2.6.32: 1.6-24
pve-kernel-2.6.32-3-pve: 2.6.32-14
pve-kernel-2.6.32-4-pve: 2.6.32-24
qemu-server: 1.1-22
pve-firmware: 1.0-9
libpve-storage-perl: 1.0-14
vncterm: 0.9-2
vzctl: 3.0.24-1pve4
vzdump: 1.2-8
vzprocps: 2.0.11-1dso2
vzquota: 3.0.11-1
pve-qemu-kvm: 0.12.5-2
ksm-control-daemon: 1.0-4

Thanks
Sean.
 
i had similar problems with some but not all virtualized windows-vms. seems to be some weird problem with the drive-geometry of the vm-disk.

i could resolve this issue using the following method:

* boot the vm using a linux live-cd (i use debian-live)
* get the file ntfsfixboot-0.9.tar.bz2 from sourceforge.net
* unpack it in the "live-vm"
* compile the stuff - its only one file (gcc -o ntfsfixboot ntfsfixboot.c)
* run (as root): ntfsfixboot -w /dev/sda1
* install new mbr (not sure if this is really needed): lilo -M /dev/sda mbr
* reboot, vm should now start window$

worked fine for me, however, your mileage may vary.

hope that helps
jo
 

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