Windows 2008 (32 bit, not R2) imported from ESXi crashes during boot

[Exmachina]

Hi,
I'm testing import of our VMs from ESXi environment, to eventually plan a migration away from VMware.
We have quite old VMs, too.
I've successfully imported, using Proxmox wizard, a Win2008 not R2 (32 bit). However, when I try to boot it, it starts boot sequence and shows the spash, but then it stops with a blue screen.
I tried with various conigurations (vmware driver for SCSI, host as CPU, both machine types) but I've come up to nothing good.
I found some posts that talk of problems with Win2008 32 bit.
Is there a best practice to have it running, as far as you know?

Thanks a lot for your advice, I'm glad I can rely on this forum.

 

[zzz09700]

Could be the drivers, Windows never does well where there's a sudden hardware change, and moving from ESXi to QEMU is a rather drastic hardware change in the view of the OS.

Try boot windows in safe mode and if that works remove as much driver package as you can and then reboot. No guarantee this will work though.

Years back we switched the CPU on our win server(running on baremetal, not virtualized), from Haswell and Broadwell, and ended up reinstalling the OS. Symptoms are the same as OP and it does not even boot in safe mode.

We made ourselfnsome trouble and ditched windows completely afterwards, both on workstations and servers.

 

[cwt]

What BSOD do you get? Is it possible to read the stop message and code or does the VM restart instantly?