Hi experts,

 

I've attempted to move a Windows Server 2019 VM from my cache drive to an unassigned drive in order to separate things a little bit. The problem is that when I go to spin up the VM again it boots straight into the Server 2019 installation wizard instead of simply booting into Windows. I assume that I screwed up royally somewhere along the way, but I could really use some help with figuring out where as well as what the correct procedure would be.

 

In order to move the VM I did the following:

- shut down the VM

- copied folder containing the vdisk img from "/mnt/user/domains/Server 2019" to "/mnt/disks/vdisks/Server 2019" (I named the partition on the unassigned device "vdisks")

- edited the configuration of the VM and changed the "Primary vDisk Location" setting to "/mnt/disks/vdisks/Server 2019/vdisk1.img"

- spun up VM

 

As already mentioned this resulted in the installation wizard starting up. I can only assume that somehow the information that there is already an OS installed on the VM is somehow lost, although I cannot quite figure out why that would happen. Any pointers on how to do this correctly would be hugely appreciated! 🙂

 

UNRAID v6.7.2

You basically did everything right. Shutdown the VM, move/copy the vdisk, change the path. In general this works without any issues. Except of one. If you have some custom changes in the xml and edit the VM config in the template and not in the xml the old custom changes in the xml can get lost. Save way is to change the path in the xml. Do you have a backup of your old xml you can use and only change the path in it?

 

Maybe your vdisk got corrupted during the copy process. Did the copy process finished before you have started up the VM again? Is the new drive a healthy one or an old one you had laying around that might had some bad sectors?

Dang....I was hoping that I had made a mistake somewhere - then at least I would have had an explanation as to why it isn't working.

 

I don't recall having made any changes to the configuration other than what can be done in the GUI. I had some problems creating the VM working initially and I had to use the SeaBIOS in order to get the Windows installation to run, but other than that it ought to be "just another VM". I did grab a backup of the xml but I forget whether that was before or after I changed the path - I will have to take a look to confirm.

 

The vdisk should be in perfect order although I haven't been able to figure out how to mount it in order to inspect it (unfortunately I'm not Linux savvy and it seems to be rather difficult to do on Windows). The new drive is a Samsung 850 EVO SSD which should be in perfect working order. Also, the copy process finished well in advance of me spinning up the VM again, so that also shouldn't be the issue. I also copied the vdisk several times while attempting to fix it but this seemingly had no effect.

Do you still have the install ISO mounted in the xml?

24 minutes ago, jonathanm said:

Do you still have the install ISO mounted in the xml?

I did to begin with, in which case it would start the OS installation wizard. When the ISO is not mounted I get a "No bootable device" error in the VM when starting it (see below for complete message).

Quote

 

Booting from Hard Disk...

Boot failed: not a bootable disk

 

No bootable device

 

 

Did you edit the template using the GUI or the xml?

If via GUI, did you accidentally change the format of your vdisk? (e.g. the GUI has the tendency to change to raw by default IIRC - if you use any other format e.g. qcow2, vmdk etc. then it can cause unexpected issue).

3 hours ago, testdasi said:

Did you edit the template using the GUI or the xml?

If via GUI, did you accidentally change the format of your vdisk? (e.g. the GUI has the tendency to change to raw by default IIRC - if you use any other format e.g. qcow2, vmdk etc. then it can cause unexpected issue).

I updated the path to the vdisk using the GUI but I did not change the format as that is not available through the GUI once the VM has been created. Nevertheless, that was EXACTLY the problem! Somehow the format had changed to 'raw'. Changing it back to 'qcow2' in the xml fixed everything! 😄

 

Thank you to all who participated! 👍