VMWare – Converting a virtual IDE disk to a virtual SCSI disk

• Virtual machine contains an IDE virtual disk as the primary OS bootable disk after conversion from physical source.
• Virtual machine has an IDE virtual disk but the additional secondary virtual disks are SCSI with an LSI or Bus Logic controller.
• Virtual machine fails to boot with only a black screen after conversion with possible underscore. The Primary disk is an IDE virtual disk but LSI or Bus Logic was selected during conversion.
• After conversion using P2V, the virtual machine fails to boot

When converting a physical machine to a virtual machine using VMware Converter or vCenter Converter Enterprise, if an adapter type is not selected during the initial customization the resulting virtual machine may contain an IDE disk as the primary OS disk.

You must convert the IDE disk to SCSI to get the best performance. If the primary disk is an IDE virtual disk, the newly converted virtual machine may fail to boot because the guest OS does not support the driver. Second reason for this issue is that in ESX 4.x the default disk type for Windows XP 32bit virtual machine creation is IDE. This default value can be manually changed during the virtual machine creation wizard by selecting the custom option. Windows XP 64bit will still use SCSI by default.

1. Locate the datastore path where the virtual machine resides. For example:/vmfs/volumes/<datastore_name>/<vm_name>/
2. From the ESX Service Console, open edit the primary disk (.vmdk) in a text editor.
3. Look for the line:ddb.adapterType = ”ide”
4. To change the adapter type to LSI Logic change the line to:ddb.adapterType = ”lsilogic”To change the adapter type to Bus Logic change the line to:ddb.adapterType = ”buslogic”
5. Save the file.
6. From VMware Infrastructure or vSphere Client
   1. Click Edit Settings for the virtual machine.
   2. Select the IDE virtual disk.
   3. Choose to Remove the Disk from the virtual machine.
   4. Click OK.Caution: Make sure that you do not choose Remove from disk.
7. From the Edit Settings menu for this virtual machine:
   1. Click Add > Hard Disk > Use Existing Virtual Disk.
   2. Navigate to the location of the disk and select to add it into the virtual machine.
   3. Choose the same controller as in Step 3 as the adapter type. The SCSI ID should read SCSI 0:0.
8. If a CDROM device exists in the virtual machine it may need to have the IDE channel adjusted from IDE 0:1 to IDE 0:0. If this option is greyed out, remove the CDROM from the virtual machine and add it back. This sets it to IDE 0:0.