Hard drive crash during P2V conversion ends happily, eventually.

I was doing a P2V conversion of my laptop many months ago, a Dell D800, into an ESX 3.5 virtual machine. The drive was 60GB was partitioned into two logical drives and all seemed to be going well.

At about 95% of completion the laptop blue-screened. When I rebooted it, the drive would not recognize.

I tried many different boot CD’s to fix boot sectors; retry a Windows XP install, no go! I even put it in an external USB case and tried just to access the data. When I did that I could hear that famous *clicking* and resetting sound. Not good. The drive was toast.

I pondered the odds of actually having a drive crash while doing a P2V and contemplated a trip to Vegas.

At that point I had pretty much written my data off. Outside of using a service like On-track recovery services (which can be prohibitively expensive) I simply shelved the drive.

On the VMware side of things though, I did seem to have my logical hard drives intact. I clicked with hope on the start button of the VM.

My hopes were dashed after that when I tried to start the virtual XP machine and simply got a black screen with a flashing cursor. Nothing I did in ESX would seem to alleviate the problem so for the time being I had hit a roadblock.

So, I had 60GB of VMDK data (thick format) that was occupying space on my test lab that I almost just deleted one day. I am so GLAD I resisted that temptation.

After I had learned more about the inner workings of VMware months later I decided to try again.

This time I came across an interesting error I hadn’t noticed before:
When the virtual machine would boot, I noticed that the BIOS screen would briefly say that the A: drive had an error during the post. Not a problem I thought I will just disconnect it in the settings tab. This didn’t fix the issue.

Then I had the idea of installing a new copy of XP over the existing copy. But to do that I needed to use the SCSI driver .flp image and the F6 option when setting up XP. So that brought me back to the BIOS screen floppy disk error. It was like the VM BIOS itself had a corruption that was keeping the OS from booting.

Then it hit me. Create a new XP virtual machine and mount the two drives as extra data drives to it.

BINGO!

All the data was there, it was just a matter of getting to it.

Now that it’s running on ESX4i I will do a migration to make the drives thin format and all will be well.

I’ve since replaced the failed drive and installed Windows 7 on it, but the important thing was I recovered all the data since my last backup.

What I’d like to do now is make backups of the VMDK files and then delete the current C: drive of the current XP VM. This would make the old C: drive the default boot device again theoretically and would help isolate if it was a VMDK issue or simply virtual machine BIOS problem. I’ll post my findings.