Vista - Problem running Complete Vista backup in VPC

I read somewhere on the web that the Vista Complete Backup could be run with VPC 2007. But I can not get it to work.

I installed VPC 2007 and created a quest.
I changed the vhd to point to the one created by Vista Complete Backup.

When I try to start the guest it tries to do DHCP and that is it. It acts like it did not use the vhd I specified.

My PC is running Vista Ultimate 32.

Thanks:
Jack Allen

On Fri, 23 Jan 2009 09:43:05 -0600, jca001 <guest@xxxxxx-email.com>
wrote:
Even though the backup file format is VHD it is not bootable, so it
won't be usable in a VPC guest until it is made bootable.

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)

When you say make it bootable, do you mean the guest, by loading an OS?

Then how do you access the vhd file?

Or do you mean do something to the vhd file?

Thanks:
Jack Allen

"jca001" <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote in message
news:a847b95a8384356c8d8d2619509bc50d@xxxxxx-gateway.com...What Bo really means is that the info you read is not correct. Vista
backup uses the .vhd format to create a backup. It is just that - a backup
file. It is not a bootable system image. It will not boot up in VPC.

It is possible to make a bootable image of a running system, but Vista
Backup is not it.

"Bill Grant" <not.available@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:OH1ePRefJHA.5572@xxxxxx

That's right.

And in addition, even if it were possible to boot the backup vhd in VPC,
you'd have to go through the whole process of applying all of the different
hardware drivers since the vhd will be expecting to find the emulated
hardware of a virtual machine, and won't know anything about the host's
physical hardware...


--
Mark Rae
ASP.NET MVP
http://www.markrae.net

Thanks for clarification.

I guess I just misread the post else where. It would have been nice to be able to use it to get one or two files if needed.

Do you think a complete backup to dvds could be used and restore to a guest?

Thanks:
Jack Allen

"jca001" <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote in message
news:b20ce5cf6c8a265da2b84651d63da235@xxxxxx-gateway.com...
1) Launch Virtual PC 2007

2) Select (BUT DON'T START!) an existing virtual machine, preferably with
Vista installed on it

3) Click the Settings button

4) In the left pane, click Hard Disk 2

5) In the right pane, select the backup vhd

6) Start the virtual machine

I should point out that I haven't actually tried this but, so long as the
backup vhd isn't compressed / encrypted in a specific way, it should now
appear as the virtual machine's D: drive...
As I understand it, the only difference with backing up to DVDs is that the
resulting vhd is split over more than one disk if it's too large to fit on
the first one...

If you want to back up a physical machine and restore it onto a virtual
machine, I would suggest using Acronis Universal Restore:
http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/pr...l-restore.html

It's not free, but it's pretty much guaranteed to work...


--
Mark Rae
ASP.NET MVP
http://www.markrae.net

If you need to access to your vista backup (vhd file) just install Virtual
Server 2005 (free) and use vhdmount utility. With this, you can mount your
vhd backup to your PC as a drive and access it as you access to a regular
thumb-drive or external USB disk.

Command-line to do that:

vhdmount.exe /m <VHD file path> <Drive letter>

"jca001" wrote: