Of all the things that suck in IT, this is one of my least favorite. Here’s the scenario. A client has a Dell server running Server 2003 with dynamic mirrored disks. The server is old and for some reason the network won’t communicate after a reboot. I’ve completely reinstalled TCP/IP and the driver, yet nothing has worked. It’s gone through several disk failures as well, so I figured it’s time to virtualize the bastard and see if that helps. I’ve done several P2V conversions of servers before, so I figured this would be pretty easy. Holy crap was I wrong. Since I’m using Hyper-V in this scenario, I fired up disk2vhd and let it work. After setting up the new VM and importing the disks, I quickly realized it wasn’t booting. That’s when I discovered the source disks were dynamic. I tried to convert them to basic with a hex editor, but everything I attached the vhdx’s to thought the partitions were not formatted. This led me to do some research on other methods to convert the source disks, but I couldn’t find anything that claimed to do the job without reinstalling Windows. Being the persistent bastard that I am, I decided to install VMware Converter and make a VMware VM out of it. I didn’t have a way to run the VM, but that allowed me to use Starwind V2V Converter and convert each vmdk to vhdx. I started with just the boot drive to verify my theory was correct. It worked! Not only is the disk now basic, it booted on the first try! I converted the second disk, tested it, and then powered down the physical server for good.
Converting a physical server with Dynamic Disks to a Hyper-V VM
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