Virtual Machine cannot be booted after a successful restore (4045436)

Title: Virtual Machine cannot be booted after a successful restore
Date: 07/2010
NV Version: 8.5.1
OS Version: all
Application version:
Plugin version: Vmware Plugin 2.0

Symptom:
Customer backs up a VM with two disks. The first is an SCSI disk and the second has an IDE interface.
After a successful restore the order of the disk ID has changed. Disk 1 becomes two and vice-versa.
As a result the VM cannot be booted.

Explanation:

This is a known issue in Vmware that occurs when an IDE hard disk is added to a hardware version 7 virtual machine. This is reported in the list of known issues by Vmware:
http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_esx40_vc40_rel_notes.html#knownissues


An IDE hard disk added to a hardware version 7 virtual machine is defined as Hard Disk 1 even if a SCSI hard disk is already present
If you have a hardware version 7 virtual machine with a SCSI disk already attached as Hard Disk 1 and you add an IDE disk, the virtual machine alters the disk numbering. The IDE disk is defined as Hard Disk 1 and the SCSI disk is changed to Hard Disk 2.
Workaround: None. However, if you decide to delete one of the disks, do not rely exclusively on the disk number. Instead, verify the disk type to ensure that you are deleting the correct disk.

In the test we have carried the VM was booted after deleting the IDE disk. As stated above this is a known Vmware issue and Netvault is not causing this behavior. The deletion of the IDE will allow the booting of the machine but the data will be lost. It MAY be possible to hack the VM configuration file and re-arrange the order of the disk to avoid the deletion of the disk.

Please refer to the text above