I am attempting to migrate a Windows Server 2008 R2 physical server to a proxmox VM with only a backup of the physical servers C: drive.

My approach was to do a fresh install of Windows Server 2008 R2 on proxmox, delete the C: partition, and copy in the backed up C: from the physical server.

As expected this didn’t boot.

I then booted into the installation DVD and tried to repair my boot manager (using https://www.ubackup.com/windows-server/how-to-repair-windows-server-2008-r2-using-command-prompt.html). After doing the steps outlined in that blog post the bootmanager would start to load windows but I would get put into the “Windows Error Recovery” screen where I can either “Start Windows Normally” or “Launch Startup Repair”.

Selecting “Launch Startup Repair” tells me “The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible”, Status 0xc000000f.

Selecting Start Windows Normally will result on a BSOD with no useful information (to my eyes, see pic below)

bsod

The original machine had 4 partitons.. sdb1 – Dell backup partition, sdb2 boot partition, sdb3 c: (I have a copy of this), sdb4 extra data partition used for network shares

In the new proxmox VM I have 2 partitions, the boot partition and the main OS partition. Are these mismatched partitions the cause of this problem, if so, how I can direct windows/bootmanager to boot from the 2nd partition instead of the 3rd?

Is there a better way of achieving this goal?

For context: the physical machines HDDs are failing. It contains software that is no longer supported by the vendor, an upgraded version of which would cost $30,000, so starting from fresh is not really an option.

I already tried clonezilla but the images created would not restore correctly.. the clonezilla image for /dev/sdb3 did not contain a valid NTFS filesystem (confirmed by unzipping the image and trying to mount)

Thanks