I have just installed VMWare ESXi and imported one physical machine without issue and one virtual machine, from an older version of VMWare Server on a Linux system, to it without issue. But I have another machine (Windows XP), virtual running on the VMWare Server, that I can't get the Converter to work with.

Converter runs, says everything is fine, but when I go to the ESXi VSphere manager and hit the button to power up that vm, the console stays black with a blinking cursor and the processor for that VM spikes 100% and stays there. An event log item in VSphere warns something about activation issues with Windows.

Has anyone else run into this issue before? Is it something with the disk controller? I copied the folder with the VM directly to the storage drive on ESXi hoping to create a new machine and point the data store to that folder or at least that drive image; nope, something about not using an IDE controller (must be something with the older format).

In short, converter is doing something that particular machine doesn't like, and I can't find a way to simply open that hard disk image or convert it unless someone else has seen this. I try attaching a bootable CD image for disk repair to see if it can check the hard drive but I can't seem to get the console to boot from it...either too slow on the button or it just isn't able to easily boot from a virtual drive image (.iso).

Any suggestions or help?