Vista - restore an image file in Virtual PC

I would like to run a program similar to Norton Ghost to recover an image
onto a virtual machine. Firstly, I'm not able to get virtual machine
additions to work (mainly because the information found has been sparse or an
assumption is made that we're all guru's, etc.) in any case, since I cannot
share a folder from the host to the guest I'm not able to restore the image.

Is there anything that can be done?

On Thu, 5 Feb 2009 10:25:00 -0800, La <La@xxxxxx>
wrote:
The VM Additions for what OS? They need an OS to run on top of.
If you're trying to boot off the Norton Ghost recovery disk or floppy,
you're not going to be able to get the VM Additions installed.

A better option would be to try using your network and copying the
files that way. Boot your VM and connect to your network, all VMs
have the same NIC, Intel 21140. There is a link for NDIS drivers on
my site.
After you boot, connect to the host's network share and restore the
image.

--
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
http://vpc.essjae.com/

On Thu, 5 Feb 2009 10:25:00 -0800, La <La@xxxxxx>
wrote:
I made a Ghost 2003 boot image where I also added the FSHARE.exe file
to the floppy (virtual floppy of course).
THe FSHARE.exe is part of the VPC2004 virtual machine additions for
DOS, which are no longer shipping with VPC2007. But Steve Jain has the
VPC2004 additions files for download on his site so I recommend using
that to grab the files. (http://vpc.essjae.com/)

In the autoexec file on the boot floppy I added fshare as a command in
order to load it when booting from the virtual floppy. I don't load
ghost in autoexec since I want to create the shared folder first...

So now when I use this boot disk it starts up and waits for me to do
something. At this time I'll go to the VPC console and now I can
create the shared folder for the vm thanks to fshare running in the
guest.
Next I start ghost in the guest and when restoring I can now select
the image that resides on the share on the host and it restores using
this image.
This technique can also be used to create an image of a virtual
machine, but is not so useful since the whole VHD file can easily be
copied on the host....

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)

On Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:26:13 +0100, Bo Berglund <boberglund@xxxxxx>
wrote:
Hey Bo,
have you tried doing a restore this way? Since the VMA file sharing
can be a little flakey on large/long tranfers I'm wondering if you've
had success with this?
I've only ever used the standard networking for Ghost imaging, it's
always worked this way for me.

--
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
http://vpc.essjae.com/

On Thu, 05 Feb 2009 11:36:22 -0800, "Steve Jain [MVP]"
<noreply.-@-.essjae.com> wrote:
Yes, I did exactly this a couple of years ago when I migrated our
testing system from a multibooting PC where we had many Ghost images
of various Windows versions (MSDN) that we could restore to make any
particular test on a "virgin" OS install. Very awkward to do, the
preparation for a new test was about 15-20 minutes for the restore
process...
Then along came VPC and I decided to try it and after it worked to my
satisfaction I migrated all of the already present Ghost images into
virtual machines using the described method.

Of course the old multiboot PC was rather old as well so the harware
differences were easily handled by the PnP system of Windows after
booting up in VPC. And I just had to reactivate a few of them then I
had it all going.
Nowadays we just use the old multiboot machine when we must test USB
handling (basically our software protection scheme uses SafeNet
Sentinel dongles and won't work in VPC...).

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)

I'll give your suggestions a try and get back w/u

"Bo Berglund" wrote:

The host is Vista Enterprise and the restore on the guest will be XP Pro sp2
and Acronis to do the restore.

There's an issue of using the network for the share because (I'm
assuming...) that the network (the powers that be) will pick up the guest as
an unauthorized PC - so I would not mind doing it this way as long as I don't
get locked out.

I'll give the fshare procedure a try...


"Bo Berglund" wrote: