Imported ESXi VM with Windows 2000 is not booting

[8dkk3]

Hi everyone,

i am tinkering around with a proxmox test system (PVE_8.3-1) at our environment. I tested the new import wizard and for a Windows 10 machine this worked like a charm.
Another machine i want to import is an old Windows 2000 machine that we have to keep because of legacy software.

The VM itself was created with Vmware vCenterConverter as a P2V conversion.

At first i tried to import with standard settings. This resulted in a "stuck at boot" screen (see screenshot). The cpu utilization is at 100% while stuck at boot.

After some google search i found out that i should use ide for the disks and VMware PVSCSI Controller. No luck with that.

Here is my actual vm config:

bios: seabios
boot: order=ide1;ide0
cores: 1
cpu: qemu32
ide0: none,media=cdrom
ide1: local-zfs:vm-101-disk-0,aio=native,size=17634M
ide2: local-zfs:vm-101-disk-1,aio=native,size=10G
machine: pc-i440fx-9.0
memory: 512
meta: creation-qemu=9.0.2,ctime=1739871193
name: FraeseW2k
ostype: w2k
scsihw: pvscsi
smbios1: uuid=564d361a-fb9e-08ee-1b92-2db3b06defe2
sockets: 1
vmgenid: e63ebac6-4a33-43e7-8058-ff546f22f4d3

Also tried to uninstall vmware tools before import - no luck
I read that i should install qemu guest agent before import. I downloaded the virtio-win-0.1.266.iso and tried to install manually the qemu-ga-i386.msi but that fails with error message, see attached screenshot. Translated from German:
Error loading C:\Program Files\qemu-ga\qga-vss.dll
The specified procedure was not found.

The mentioned file is available at that path, i also have administrator privileges.

When i enter the boot menu before the vm tries to boot, i see both imported disks (third screenshot). So why does it still fail to boot?
Any help would be great!
Greets, Robert

 

[l.leahu-vladucu]

Hello 8dkk3! While I don't have a solution to your problem, I just wanted to mention that the latest version of virtio-win doesn't have support for Windows 2000, which explains the error message you are seeing. You can try to see if an older version would work, or one the even older deprecated ISOs. However, to my knowledge, there are no virtio-win drivers for Windows 2000.

The oldest guides available are for Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP. There are also some notes for Windows NT guests. Maybe there is some useful information there.

Setting your drives to IDE is probably a good idea, although you might still need an IDE driver - I just don't think that there are any drivers supporting it. Let us know if you found any workaround!

 

[_gabriel]

Welcome to good old days

Windows 2000 require ide virtual disk + enable driver :
https://www.biermann.org/philipp/STOP_0x0000007B/

Since Windows 10 ( iirc W8 too), booting once in Safemode is enough to enable / re-enable the default IDE and AHCI SATA driver.

 

[l.leahu-vladucu]

Another idea: not sure if this helps, but you can also try setting the machine version to an older one. I see that you are using pc-i440fx-9.0, so in the Machine settings keep using i440fx, but under Advanced, you can try setting an older version and see if this makes any difference.

By the way, some workarounds might be necessary to make Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 work - see this wiki page about Mergeide. There's also a link to a page for Windows 2000, but unfortunately, it seems to be dead. Thankfully, the Wayback Machine cached it - see this link.

 

[sdettmer]

Hi everyone,

i am tinkering around with a proxmox test system (PVE_8.3-1) at our environment. I tested the new import wizard and for a Windows 10 machine this worked like a charm.
Another machine i want to import is an old Windows 2000 machine that we have to keep because of legacy software.

ahh welcome to the hell of ancient systems
I also had struggle to get Windows 2000 working, but somehow managed it. First, of course, forget about installing any recent (e.g. 10 years or less) software to it, but on the internet you may find the needed old drivers.
I think I could somewhere find my notes, I just remember that beside IDE (I think I used SCSI, for IDE there is https://www.virtualbox.org/attachment/wiki/Migrate_Windows/MergeIDE.zip) I somehow had to add something like "-vga cirrus" or such to qemu options.