Vmware Converter.

Hi.

I just tried to use VMware converter to convert a Physical machine (Win NT) to Virtual Machine.

Following issues came up while converting the machine.

Installation Of Converter Agent:
1. While installing thru the manager it give Unknown error while installing agent.
You can also install the agent directly on the machine. In this case you will know what the messages are:
Mostly the errors will be related to folders not having permissions. This is because Agent tries to write all the files using System Account and hence in NT desire System Acc to have write priviledges on the folders.
To see which folder the installation has stopped on start the installer from the command prompt on the machine like the undergiven command:
abc.msi /l install.log
The above given command starts the installation and logs the progress into install.log simulatneously.
2. Once the installation is complete (manual/Automatic) it often happens that the manager tries to start the agent installation again and again.
this is because the agent service is not running as the machine needs to reboot once the agent has been installed. Make sure that the machine is rebooted after agent installation.

Destination Folder:
The Destination folder needs to be accessible from both destination machine, source machine and manager machine. and should have write access permissions for installation.
So best way out of the problem is to give Domain\Anonymous Full controll to it for the time the migration is going on.

While bringing up the machine as well there were some issues as given below:

The machine start but you will not be able to install vmware tools:
Reason for this is that NT doesnt has builtin drivers for IDE cdrom which is probably being used in the OS. Since the drivers not loaded no drive available to vmware to load vmware-tools iso to. A very simple solution is available for this problem. Change the drive to a SCSI drive as drivers for scsi are built in.

The Machine doesnt connects to network in a bridged enviornment:
The issue which I saw in this particular problem was that the machine was on a bridged connection and the bridging service apparently didn't start up when the virtual machine was started.
Just shutdown the virtual machine and restart vmware services for this to resolve.
If it still doesnt works remove the ethernet adapter and create a new one.

Cygwin Not showing right groups.

1. First check whether the group u want to c is the primary group for that user in the Domain. If not Make it the Primary group.
2. Next check whether the local group policies have been updated. Without that Cygwin wont be able to know which group the user is referring to.
3. Remake the passwd and the group files of cygwin using mkpasswd and mkgroup command.
Without this Changed data will not be updated into Cygwin authentications and the error will still remain there.

fat32 partition mounting /etc/fstab entries

/dev/hda1 /mountpoint defaults,umask=000 0 0

Adding plugin to mozilla installation.

Folder : /usr/lib/mozilla/plugin

Global Addition.

Windows MBR Reset

Say you installed Linux on a windows machine to make is a dual boot machine.

Now ur linux is of no use and u want to remove it.

You remove all the linux partitions but now the machine is not able to boot into windows as it not getting grub.

So recover u need to reset MBR.
Very Simple process.
Use Windows CD to boot.
give commands fixmbr and fixboot.

Voilla the windows is back up.

Grub Recovery

Some times it happens tht ur grub goes down all though u know that the hard drives and the partitions are perfectly ok.

Here is a situation i faced:

Consider a Dual boot machine with 2 OS WinXP (1st) and RHEL (2nd).
Now I had to disect the second partition available to windows into 2 and all linux partitions were after this partition.

Once disected the machine stop booting.
Reason :
Machine was being booted using grub. once I added a partition in between the id (numbering) of original linux partitions shifted ahead by 1. Hence the MBR was unable to find the boot files and got stuck.

To resolve the issue u need to reconfigure grub.

Here is what u do:

1. use linux cd to boot in rescue mode.
   boot : Linux rescue.
2. Once booted and the RHEL installations have been found out u get the prompt.
3. chroot /mnt/sysimage. This changes the root to the / of the installations available.
4. grub-install /dev/hda or sda or sdb etc. This reconfigures MBR.

Although the MBR is reset but the OS will still not work.
Reason: the partitions given where it needs to find kernel processes are the old ones and hence wrong.

So open grub.conf and change them accordingly.

Solaris Device Detection.

Unlike Windows and Linux Solaris does not starts detection of new hardware while booting up.
Either it needs to be told to boot up in reconfigure mode or u have to detect all the devices using specific commands.

Here I will Put the ways of automatic reconfiguration:

1. boot -r command on ok prompt (openBoot) before loading of OS.
2. touch /etc/reconfigure in OS to detect new devices next time it boots.
3. reboot -- -r. In this command what we are actually doing is rebooting and telling it to pass options to the boot command on ok prompt. Anything after -- is considered as options for boot.

Remember these commands are to detect the devices. Some devices might still require some drivers to be installed to run properly.