Converting Acronis TIB image of Windows 2003 Server to Hyper-V VHD causes “disk read error occurred” message
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We had a problem whereby using Acronis to convert a Windows 2003 TIB image to a VHD to run on the Hyper-V server did not work. “a disk read error occurred” message came up in the virtual server when trying to load. To me this indicated image did not contain the relevant virtual hard disk drivers, and there was no way to load them into the image.
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I found on the 2008 Hyper-V server in the c:\windows\system32 folder is an ISO called vmguest.iso.
Creating a CD with this produces a setup disk to install guest integration services.
If you run the setup.exe in the root of this disk on a Windows 2003 server, it will not install. You will get the message
The Hyper-V integration services can only be installed inside of a virtual machine running under Hyper-V
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Typical of Microsoft,it is saying that you cannot load guest services on an operating system until it is already running under Hyper-V, which requires the guest services to be installed before it will run!
To get around this you have to drill down to the en-us\update folder and run update.EXE. Now on the server you will then see the hyper-v guest components installed in add/remove programs.
You can now proceed with creating the Acronis image with the loaded guest components and convert it to a VHD which will then load as a virtual server OK.
This will also be required for converting a Windows XP System to a VHD using Acronis.
Windows 2008 server has the guest components built in and so this is not required, I’m not sure about Vista. But more than likely you would only VHD server systems anyway.
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I created an account just to thank you for this tip! I’m rolling out a Hyper-V DR environment for a client, and trying to do a P2V with BackupExec System Recovery yielded the same error, but your solution worked like a charm. Thanks again.
Comment by itchy92 — 12/02/2009 @ 11:37 am