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VMware Converter is unable to see the disks when converting Windows Operating systems

Symptoms

When converting a Windows operating system, you see these symptoms:
  • The converter wizard does not display some or all of the data disks
  • When you schedule the conversion job and attempt to change the parameter, previously missing data drives are seen but with an arbitrary size

Resolution

This issue occurs if the Windows operating system uses GUID Partition table (GPT) disks. VMware Converter does not convert GPT disks. For more information about GPT disks and list of operating systems that support GPT, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg463525.aspx.

To verify if your Windows Server 2008 machine has GPT disks:
  1. Log into the Windows operating system as an administrative user.
  2. Click Start > Run, type diskpart, and click OK.
  3. In the command prompt that appears, run this command:

    list disk
  4. In the output of the command, verify whether the disks use the GPT standard.
To be able to convert the Windows operating system that uses GPT disks, the data on the GPT based drives must be relocated using 3rd party tools. 
 
To work around this issue, try one of these options:
  • Back up the data residing in the GPT drives, create new MBR based drives, and then restore the data to the MBR drive after the conversion.
  • Back up the data residing in the GPT drives and then restore the data to a new virtual disk in the virtual environment
  • Add the GPT partitioned disks as RDMs to the virtual machines after conversion.

Tags

converter-windows-fails  convert-windows-fails

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