Just this last week I was updating an old Packer build configuration from JSON to HCL. But for the life of me could not get a new vSphere Windows 2019 machine to find a disk attached to Para Virtualized disk controller.
I repeatedly received this error after the machine new machine booted.
In researching error 0x80042405 in C:\Windows\pather\setuperr.log, I found it simply could not find the attached disk.
After some research I determined the PVSCSI drivers added to the floppy disk where not being discovered. Or more specifically the new machine didn’t know to search the floppy for additional drivers.
I finally found a configuration section for my autounattend.xml file which would fix it after an almost exhaustive online search.
The magic section reads as follows.
<unattend xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:unattend">
<settings pass="windowsPE">
<component name="Microsoft-Windows-PnpCustomizationsWinPE" processorArchitecture="amd64" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<DriverPaths>
<PathAndCredentials wcm:action="add" wcm:keyValue="A">
<!-- pvscsi-Windows8.flp -->
<Path>A:\</Path>
</PathAndCredentials>
</DriverPaths>
</component>
...
</settings>After adding this section, the new vSphere Windows machine easily found the additional drivers.
This was tested against Windows 2019 in both AWS and vSphere deployments.
The vSphere deployment took an hour, mostly waiting for the updates to be applied. AWS takes significantly less time as I’m using the most recently updated image they provide.
The working files are located in the packer-hcl-vsphere-aws github repo.
{!aCoder} 