Physical to Virtual conversion with Grub intact

Shmu26

Member
Joined
Dec 11, 2018
Messages
95
Reaction score
32
Credits
624
I need help with the VMware P2V standalone converter.
When I convert a system with grub, the VM is unable to boot, even though I included the boot partition in the image. I get to a grub screen that lists commands and none of them seem to work.
What's the trick to convert a system with grub?
 


First of all what is VMware P2V standalone convert? What are you actually converting and to what are you converting it to? What are you actually trying to do, not quite sure what you are trying to do.
 
First of all what is VMware P2V standalone convert? What are you actually converting and to what are you converting it to? What are you actually trying to do, not quite sure what you are trying to do.
VMware vCenter Converter Standalone

This free tool converts the selected disks of a physical machine into a vmdk file which can then be used as a virtual disk in VMware or VirtualBox. (I use the latter, and I convert it from vmdk to vdi, although this step is not stricly necessary.)

I want to convert my physical Kubuntu installation into a virtual disk.

It works great when converting a single-boot, Windows-only physical machine into a virtual disk. The problems arise when the machine to be converted has linux entries in the boot partition.

I hope this makes things clearer.
 
I think the only disk known to grub is your physical disk for example /dev/sda or if you were using an nvme disk on your physical machine something like /dev/nvme0n1. Was your physical machine efi boot? If yes you will have to set efi boot on your virtual machine within vmware. Then you would need to boot using the iso into rescue environment find out which how your systems sees the vmware disk as in what name, for example /dev/vda. Then use grub install with --target=i386-pc on that disk. If your system is using efi then you would need to use grub-install with --target=x86_64-efi option and then target your efi partition and the other correct grub options.
 
Last edited:
I think the only disk known to grub is your physical disk for example /dev/sda or if you were using an nvme disk on your physical machine something like /dev/nvme0n1. What your physical machine efi boot? If yes you will have to set efi boot on your virtual machine within vmware. Then you would need to boot using the iso into rescue environment find out which how your systems sees the vmware disk as in what name, for example /dev/vda. Then use grub install with --target=i386-pc on that disk. If your system is using efi then you would need to use grub-install with --target=x86_64-efi option and then target your efi partition and the other correct grub options.
What ISO to use? This sounds like it might work.
 
What ISO to use? This sounds like it might work.
You said previously you are running Kubuntu so I would just boot from the Kubuntu cd into the live environment and there you shoudl be able to get the information about your disk and be able to run a grub-install.
 
Read up on grub here if you need to know more about grub-install.
 
Read up on grub here if you need to know more about grub-install.
Thanks. I actually have a MX Linux ISO, it has an awesome grub installer/repair tool. I think I would let it try to do it, maybe it will save me a headache. It fixes grub for other distros, not just for MX.
 

Members online


Latest posts

Top