I have been rolling out Hyper-V hosts and creating Hyper-V VM's for quite a while now. Everything fine, until this case. I need some greater minds to shed some light on this.
I need to convert a running Windows 2008 R2 server with 8 GB RAM into a Hyper-V VM. We need this machine so we can run a specific old software (from time to time), and the physical machine is acting up. My Hyper-V host runs Windows 2019 Hyper-V host, has
enough physical RAM (16 GB). It has been used to create and run all kinds of VM's (Windows 2008 server --> Windows 2019 server), Windows 10 etc.. Never failed. RAID 10 on harddisks and enough room.
I have tried a few ways to create the VHD file for this runing server. Straight from the server with disk2vhd, and from system recovery backups created by Veritas Back-up Exec System Recovery (tried a few version of the software). My VHD's contain all the
files I see on the real server, and the real server has only one partition. No hidden partition (checked with diskpart).
The VM I create has the same amount of RAM as the real one, Generation 1. When I attach an iso to it, with the Windows 2008 R2 boot disk, it boots just as expected. One I attach the VHD to it, it never boots. Black screen, blinking cursor (if the VHD is
the first boot drive), sentence showing I need to push any key to start booting from DVD if the DVD is the first boot device. But the VM does not boot. Once I disconnect the VHD, the same VM boots fine.
Tried creating a blank VHD for the same VM: VM boots fine.
I have never has this experience with Hyper-V and none of my Google searches bring this scenario up. Any ideas?
Next up I will try a competitive system to boot the VHD.
Kind regards,
Wouter Pinkhof
Wouter Pinkhof PINKH bvba, PC-Hulp.com