Vmware converter does not allow changing of virtual scsi drive to ide
I had a case where I converted a physical linux machine (pentium III with ide drives) to vmware (both vmware server and vmware esxi) , and it modified the virtual drive type to scsi. Unfortunately, this caused the virtualized linux machine to not boot, as it’s looking to boot via /dev/hda , not /dev/sda. The virtual systems didn’t allow to mount a scsi virtual drive as an ide drive - will give an error like “scsi drive geometry not usable in ide” . A possible fix is to modify the linux boot to look for /dev/sda instead of /dev/hda. I took the alternate route instead by
1) creating a blank IDE hard drive in the virtual machine with the same size as the original hard drive
2) mounting the virtual machine to an ISO image of KNOPPIX or any other type of linux livecd.
3) turn on the virtual linux machine and get it to boot the ISO cd.
4) I like to boot knoppix/linux into text mode, so I usually type in knoppix 2 dma at the boot prompt
5) onced booted, check to see which drives are which, I use dmesg | grep sd and dmesg | grep hd . For my case, /dev/sda was the unbootable scsi drive, and /dev/hda was the blank ide drive I just created.
6) use the command to image sda to hda : dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/hda
7) you could also add bs=16M or whatever blocksize to use, depends on how much memory you have available in the virtual machine.
8) after completion, shut down the virtual machine, then disable the original scsi drive, or just change the boot order in the bios to make sure the ide drive boots first.
9) that’s it, you’re done.