NetworkSydney

Here is a quick one line powershell command to spit out the Location (port, bus, scsi target id, lun id), size (in GB) and Device ID (also known as disk number in the windows gui) into a file.

Get-WmiObject Win32_DiskDrive | select-object DeviceID,{$_.size/1024/1024/1024},scsiport,scsibus,scsitargetid,scsilogicalunit | out-file -FilePath c:\output.txt

Note: This command is one line, watchout for wordwrap!

It seems VMware ESX 3.x does not support virtual IDE hard drives. So when converting physical machines or workstation images that are configured with IDE hard drives you may be greeted with a 0×07B blue screen. There is a fair bit of material out there, but I thought it might be valuable to provide my perspective as well.

Simply put, I replaced the atapi,sys file with the symmpi.sys file found on another virtual machine. Once this was done I was able to boot into the operating system in this case Windows 2003. Windows then automatically reconfigured itself and requested to reboot. After rebooting, I noticed the CD Rom drive was not configured, then I realised why the atapi.sys file had to be put back. Replacing the atapi.sys file with the original file followed by rebooting allowed me to see the CD Rom drive. I was then able to install vmware tools.

Note: although I downloaded vmscsi.sys and installed it, I am not sure that it was required. This file can be found in the vmscsi floppy image obtainable from VMware.