VMWare import with UEFI fails

Moxified

I do have a usb hard drive attached to one of them but I believe I exported it with that removed from the VMware side. I'll try again.

The other admittedly has a pass-through GPU. I assumed (I know, I know haha) that it would just ignore that during the migration. I'll try removing that as well.

olivierlambert

The PCI device is probably the issue.

Moxified

Unfortunately I don't believe that to be the case. I removed the pci device, rebooted the VM to ensure everything was fully baked in, shut it down and exported to OVA. I imported the OVA. It recognized it as BIOS which wedged at booting from hard disk with 100% CPU (as I expected it would but wanted to see what would happen). I shut it down and switched it to UEFI. That resulted in the previously seen missing device.

I then used the import from VMWare option. That did import it as UEFI but booting resulted in the exact same error.

olivierlambert

There is something special about this VM, it's seeking for a device that's not here anymore, now the question is which device Have you tried to remove the VMware tools in case they are doing something funky?

Moxified

Which is fair but I have moved 3 bios Debian 12 without issue. I have tried 2 different Debian 12 with UEFI and both have failed with the same error.

I use open-vm-tools on them. I'll try removing it but cannot start the vm for a while because something locks the vmdk on the esxi side after doing the xo migration and I have to either reboot the host or wait a while.

I'll try building a new uefi debian 12 vm and see if it happens from a clean build.

olivierlambert

Thanks, keep us posted!

Moxified

OK, I built a fresh UEFI Debian 12 from ISO on esxi. I then cloned it 3 times. I removed open-vm-tools from #2 and I installed xcp tools on #3 and imported all 3. They all have the same error.

I poked around the internet more while waiting and see other instances with proxmox in particular for Debian and Ubuntu. Something isn't jiving between DEB based UEFI and either the conversion process or TianoCore or something.

jebrown

@Moxified I had a disk lock in VMware while transferring windows vm’s and restarting XOA released the lock for me.

Moxified

@jebrown Thanks. I wondered about that. I just hadn't gotten around to trying that. Thanks for confirming!

jebrown

No problem.. Not sure if it’s related or not but worth a shot so you don’t have to wait several hours for it to unlock

Moxified

The workaround I have found at this point is to rebuild grub after migrating to XCP-NG. Adds a few minutes to each VM but I don't have that many.

Boot to live iso in UEFI mode (I used Debian12 given it was a Debian12 vm)

sudo su -
mount /dev/mapper/?????  /mnt 
mount /dev/xvda2 /mnt/boot
mount /dev/xvda1 /mnt/boot/efi
for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys /run; do sudo mount -B $i /mnt$i; done
mount --bind /sys/firmware/efi/efivars /mnt/sys/firmware/efi/efivars
chroot /mnt
grub-install /dev/xvda
update-grub
exit
shutdown now

I'm using LVM so adjust the first mount to match your root partition.
I shutdown so that I can remove iso and boot when I'm ready.

Hope this saves somebody a bunch of frustration in the future.