After P2V conversion, Virtual machine failing to boot with error - "You have ordered a Dell system with no OS installed. If you ordered it with a 3TB or larger drive attached, please note that large drives may not be supported. Press 'X' to exit."

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Attempted to convert a Physical machine to virtual machine using Converter

Conversion created a VM at the destination. However, the virtual machine will fail to boot with error - "You have ordered a Dell system with no OS installed. If you ordered it with a 3TB or larger drive attached, please note that large drives may not be supported. Press 'X' to exit." 

Environment

vSphere ESXi 7.x

vSphere ESXi 8.x

Cause

EFI boot partition at the guest OS level is corrupted/missing is cause this issue or Converter included the Dell recovery partition while converting the machine.

Resolution

• Boot the VM by attaching the windows ISO and check the boot partition

or 

Perform a snapshot of the VM as we are rebuilding BCD(Boot Configuration Data) changes for EFI partition 

• Power off the converted effected VM disk and attach the OS virtual disk of converted VM disk to the test VM which has windows OS installed
• Open Disk management in the test VM and check the EFI partition from the disk management
• go to CMD and execute below steps:
  diskpart - It would show the disk partitions
  list disk - List the disks
  sel disk <EFI disk number> - Select the EFI partition disk
  list partition - select Partition ( Where the EFI partition is available)
  delete partition override <number of the EFI partition> - deletes the EFI partition
  create partition efi size=150 ( you can set any size above 100 MB or set the same as per the deleted partition size)
  format quick fs=fat32 label="System"
  create partition msr size=128 ( you can set any size above 50 MB)
  select Partition ( Where the EFI partition is available)
  assign letter="S" ( you can assign any available drive letter)
  exit
• cd e:\windows\system32 (Verify in which partition we have System 32 for the issue OS disk)
• bcdboot e:\windows /s S: /f UEFI ( Where E: is the OS drive and S is the EFI Partition drive letter)
• detach the effected OS disk from the test Windows VM.
• Power on the converted VM, VM will boot