Thursday, July 07, 2011

Ghosted Network Adapter After P2V Using VMware Converter

I used VMware Converter to convert a physical machine to a virtual machine.  After the conversion, I shutdown the physical machine and tried to configure the virtual network adapter by re-using the IP address of the physical machine.  Just when I hit the OK button, I received the following warning message.

The IP address XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX you have entered for this network adapter is already assigned to another adapter ‘Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet’. ‘Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet’ is hidden from the Network Connections folder because it is not physically in the computer. If the same address is assigned to both adapters and they become active, only one of them will use this address. This may result in incorrect system configuration.

Do you want to enter a different IP address for this adapter in the list of IP addresses in the advanced dialog box?

I checked the Network Connections folder and indeed the ghosted network adapter is not there.

So I opened up Device Manager and it is also not there.  By selecting Show hidden devices does not do any help as well.

I did a search and found the VMware KB article.

Networking Error: IP address already assigned to another adapter

Basically, to show the ghosted network adapter, I need to do the following.

  1. Open a command prompt and enter:
    • set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
  2. At the same command prompt (this is very important), enter:
    • start devmgmt.msc
  3. Click Show hidden devices on the View menu in Device Manager.
  4. Right click the ghosted network adapters (which are in grey) and uninstall them.

Uninstalling the ghosted network adapters resolved the issue.

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