How-to fix VMware Converter error FAILED: Unable to find the system volume, reconfiguration is not possible.
I was recently tasked with migrating a Hyper-V machine to our VMware environment. However, each time VMware Converter was ran, the task would fail at 97% with an error “FAILED: Unable to find the system volume, reconfiguration is not possible.“.
Looking further into the virtual machine there were a number of concerns I had on the VM. One such issue which I believe might be causing the above error, is that the system volume drive was on drive 0 while the “C:” drive was on drive 1. Whereas these are typically on the same drive in most Windows installs.
Below are the steps I took to fix this VM and made the migration from Hyper-V to VMware a success.
Rebuild boot record to resolve, FAILED: Unable to find the system volume, reconfiguration is not possible.
- Attach the server .ISO to the newly migrated virtual machine in VMware and boot from that image. You may need to change the boot order, in order for the VM to boot from the ISO.
- Now click on Next at the language, time, keyboard prompt.
- Then, click Repair your computer in the lower left corner.
- Next, select Troubleshoot.
- Now click on Command Prompt under Advanced options.
- In the command prompt, type in the following commands:
Bootrec /fixmbr Bootrec /fixboot Bootrec /scanos Bootrec /rebuildbcd
- Finally, type EXIT in the command prompt and restart the virtual machine.
After the virtual machine rebooted, Windows Server loaded without issue and I was able to complete the migration by re-IPing the VM and updating DNS records.
