ESXi 5.5 (free) to Hyper-V Black Screen-Cursor Blinking

Recently came into an environment where Free ESXi 5.5 is being used. I'm on a project to move VM's in ESXi to Hyper-V, however, I'm running into a problem regardless of what tool I use to import to Hyper-V

The problem: VMs will not go past beyond black screen/blinking cursor after import...

TOOLS USED

1. Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter (MVMC); When using this tool, I get no errors but when firing up the VM in Hyper-V it wont go past the black screen/blinking cursor.
2. StarWind V2V; In order for me to use this tool, I had to extract the VMDK file file using 7-ZIP (a file within the OVF that gets created when I export from ESXi). Once this tool converts the VMDK to VHD,I then proceed to create a VM in Hyper-V and attach this recently converted VHD to the VM config. Fire up the VM and same issue; black screen/blinking cursor

To some search that I've done, it seems that the export/import of VM's is breaking the bootloader. Have you guys worked on a similar issue, fixed it to a point that an ISO of the original OS did not had to be used to fix the MBR?

Please advice if I'm missing any step to importing VMs from ESXi to Hyper-V, but to me it should be pretty straight forward using MS tools.

Solution 1:

I have similar issues with converting from ESXi to Hyper-V in Starwind V2V. In my case it was solved by marking “Activate Windows Repair Mode” in stage “Select option for VHD/VHDX image format”.

If it will not help, try to convert VM directly from ESXi to Hyper-V without ovf export. Starwind supports such conversion.

Solution 2:

Did you try to use this tool: https://cloudbase.it/qemu-img-windows?

I assume you can shut down your VM for some time to copy the vmdk file somewhere to perform the conversion. If not you can do a clone of a VM within the ESXi environment and then do the following steps:

1. Copy the vmdk file somewhere where you will be able to perform the conversion by using the qemu-img command line. You need a space or mount share within windows where you want to perform the conversion.

2. Convert the vmdk file to VHD or VHDX format.

3. In the Hyper-V environment, create the VM using the newly converted VHD or VHDX disk.

4. Sometimes you have to use windows iso for making windows repair, but it was rather the case in the older OS versions.

I hope it was useful insight.