P2V SBS Windows 2008: Mass Storage Driver issue around SCSI IDE changes - Boot BSOD Error 0x0000007b, 0xc0000034?
After having tried all variations and suggestions on changing drivers, registry keys and what not, I happened to come upon the only single hacky way that worked.Every converter failed as it did not manage to "resolve" the SCSI IDE Mass Storage issue that was causing the BSOD.
The larger issue here is that the Physical machine has/ had Dell LSI SCSI hardware, and despite cloning the SBS 08 to an IDE drive as a Volume / Partition and enabling IDE/ ATAPI drivers etc. the OS seemed to "miss" its SCSI booting "sequence".
So these was successfully done in Stages:
Stage 1: P2V using VMWare Converter Standalone to VMWare VM with SCSI VMDK
This is a straight forward process using the Convert Physical machine Wizard. If need be we can add a relevant link for this.
Stage 2: Boot VM off SCSI VMDK with attached Primary IDE VHD (Even an Empty VHD - Any tiny size: e.g. 1GB).
This was easy to do in VMWare Workstation 10.0 and this step seems to add certain IDE stuff to the SCSI booting which makes the OS IDE & SCSI boot capable/ able.
We had tried the manual way of hacking registry keys many times to change the Mass Storage Driver and Boot drive issues, but it causes some issues.
I found this hacky & exceptional step on this forum discussion:
How to convert VMWare image to Hyper-V images
While most online discussions & suggestions only talk about converting VMDK to VHD, this one points out the **MassStorage booting issue (SCSI vs IDE) that causes the above BSOD all the time (as I've seen and read on the web) and plagues so many P2V + Hyper V attempts and SCSI to IDE change.**
Stage 3: On another Custom VMWare VM, attach above VMDK as IDE for Primary booting. Boot, let it complete and shutdown.
Now, the drive & its OS have successfully booted via a Primary IDE and are primed for conversion to Hyper V (as Hyper V does not support booing from SCSI)
Stage 4: Using Starwind V2V Converter (or another utility) convert the VMDK to VHD
State 5: On a new Hyper V VM attach output VHD as IDE drive and boot into OS