Migrate VM from VMware Server 2 to vSphere ESXi 5

I tried to migrate an offline VM from Server 2 to ESX 5, in the process I kept getting what seemed to be a snapshot error on a VM without snapshots.  The VM would successfully migrate and then give this error on power up, or during the P2V Converter if I chose to remove snapshots.

“The parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created.  The content ID of the parent virtual disk does not match the corresponding parent content ID in the child.”

I tried about 7 times unsuccessfully to migrate the VM, then a friend suggested I modify the defaults of the P2V and choose HW version 7 instead of HW version 8, and this time it succeeded.

Problems with P2V of a physical server

The Server is a fully patched 2003 Server. P2V should be working, everything is full 1GB, all drives are NTFS, nothing funny. I'm doing this all hot by the way, no cold booting, its a production server with no downtime allowed. Each P2V attempt died near the end, it takes several hours, so I was never watching exactly when it died. Checking the logs on the client at C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware Converter Enterprise\Logs\vmware-converter-agent-2.log . Shows me the error :

"Image processing task has failed with PlatformError fault: (1117) The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.".

Obviously this indicates an I/O error. After some searching I found an interesting fact, if you maintain the size of the original drive the P2V or "import machine" will do a block level copy, and if there are bad blocks, then you can get this error. So if you change the destination drive size, it does a file level copy instead. There is a chance that this server's hard drive has bad blocks, but honestly I don't know. It's an old server, that's why i'm P2Ving it. After making a change to the destination partition size, this fixed my issue and the P2V was finally sucessful.

FYI, this was all done with the latest software, ESX 4.0U1, VC 4U1, etc...