This is a handy tool. It make cloning drives from one machine to another a snap.

Thanks
Ross

Have you tried downloading the pba-client-vm.zip from the Personal Backup Appliance? It's a "canned" VM that will boot from pba-client.iso.

After you download pba-client.zip, unzip it, and then download the pba-client.iso file and put it in the same directory with the extracted files from pba-client.zip. Once that's done, open pba-client-vm.vmx with vmplayer.

The only other thing that I could think of is an offending USB or some other peripheral device on your system that prevents it from booting past the isolinux prompt.

Hope this helps.

thanks ! It works whell !!

therefore what's the root password ???

I try to mount a smb share ... but i haven't the root password and 'vmware' doesn't works.

For that did I remove data.vmdk ? or another manipulation ?

Thanks for your answers.

I posted a Personal Backup Appliance User Guide with walk-through for the hard disk backup and restore feature. It includes screenshots!

http://rxhui.blogspot.com/2006/06/personal-backup-appliance-user-guide.html

Here's how you can use PBA to clone 20 PCs.

1. From an arbitrary PC on your network, open up the PBA using VMplayer and let it bootup completely.
2. From another system, download the bootable client CD iso image from the PBA, and burn it to CD.
3. Boot from the client CD on a system that has your master OS installation. Select Backup, provide a name, and wait for the operation to complete. The master hard disk is now archived.
4. Boot from the client CD on another system that you want to clone. Select Restore, choose the archive described by the name that you provided in Step 3. Wait for the operation to complete. The hard disk is now identical to the master. Reboot, eject CD, and boot to new OS.
5. Repeat on the other PC computers.

Here's a re-post of the link to a walk-through with screenshots that may help you out.
http://rxhui.blogspot.com/2006/06/personal-backup-appliance-user-guide.html

I think I may have found the solution for mounting external SMB/Windows shares. The smbfs package was not installed. After installing smbfs, I was able to mount my windows share.

Here's how you can mount an external SMB/Windows share from within the VM (note that this is an optional feature):

1. run this command first to install smbfs:

sudo apt-get install smbfs

2. unmount /home/vmware/data, then mount the smb share to /home/vmware/data (fill in the information for your server):

sudo umount /home/vmware/data

sudo mount -o username=user,password=password -t smbfs //server_ip/share /home/vmware/data

3. then run this command to seed the initial data

sudo /home/vmware/bin/data.sh

Please give this a try. It worked for me. Thanks a lot for trying my VM and see if you can figure out how to vote.

It looks like I will have to either install smbfs in the next version, or beef up the instructions for mounting external shares to include what I posted above.

Message was edited by:
rxhui

Direct Download is now available:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/pba-vm/Personal-Backup-Appliance-vm-1.0.0.zip?download