XenConvert – Solving Convert Issues
We’ve recently set out to convert one of our XP workstations into a virtual image to run on one of our XenServer boxes (GPU CUDA pass-through R&D for another article). We downloaded the latest version XenConvert (2.5 as of this writing) and installed it on the host machine. We made sure to clear the machine off of unnecessary files, run defrag and CCleaner. Having experience with Vmware converters in the past, we stopped all unnecessary services on the machine. We then started the conversion.
Problem 1.) “Failed to open registry key”
The first problem we ran into was some sort of odd registry issue. All the research we did online, suggested we downgrade our version of XenConvert to 2.1. So we found the older version, removed the new version and started the conversion process again.
This led us to our next problem.
Problem 2.) “Encountered an improper argument”
I hate getting into an improper argument. Thankfully, a blog post from Mr. Keith Smith points us into the right direction. Apparently the XenConvert application does NOT like very long file paths for some reason. Rather than saying that of course, they try to start an improper argument.
After running the program lister from Keith’s website and clearing all of the harmful long paths (that were of no use to us, in this particular case), we were able to get it to convert properly. Please note that after clearing the folders, we also re-ran CCleaner on the computer that also contained registry links to those paths. We made sure to clean them out as well.
Note: As a final test, we re-installed the latest version of Xen Center. It still failed with the registry key issue. Keep using the 2.1 version!
So the steps we are going to follow for a sucessfull conversion are:
- Uninstall all useless programs from target machine. Clean up harddrive. Use CCleaner.
- Disable all unecessary services temporarily.
- Run the long file path lister (http://download.cnet.com/Long-File-Path-Lister/3000-2248_4-10823078.html), delete those folders (if you can, else lookup bypassing them in the coverter).
- Re-run CCLeaner.
- Run the conversion process using XenConvert 2.1.
Hope this helps some other folks running into the same issue.
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