Ghost 9 and other ways to backup and restore a win XP installation

[fauzzo]

Hallo,

I am trying fusion, I have made an XP installation using the standard virtual harddisk settings.

Now I would like to use the "Allocate all disk space now" option to have better disk performance, so I have to create a new harddisk and reinstall XP.

I have tried to do that by using Nortong Ghost 9 to create a disk image of the first virtual machine and then I have restored it on the new one: things seems to go well but once the restore is complete windows fails to boot. It starts to reboot continuously and I have the only option to boot in safe mode that does not work too.

How can I move my working installation to a new virtual disk?

thanks a lot!

[admin]

You don't have to do this, you can convert the vmdk to a preallocated one using vmware-vdiskmanager (or my GUI wrapper[/url] for it). You'll have to point the vmx at the new vmdk because the process copies the disk, it doesn't replace it.

[fauzzo]

thank you very much for the help,

I got your nice gui software but I do not understand what to do.

It opens in "expand" tab, I think I should use "Convert" to select the current working virtual disk like Input and I have to type the same name like output but place it somewhere else and move it later where prior vdisk is. Is it so?

Further more, in my XP virtual machine I can see two vmdk files, is that normal or is a my mistake?

The vm has one vdisk only.

thanks

Message was edited by:

fauzzo

[admin]

It opens in "expand" tab, I think I should use

"Convert" to select the current working virtual disk

like Input and I have to type the same name like

output but place it somewhere else and move it later

where prior vdisk is. Is it so?

Yes. Thhe reason it opens in Expand is because there was a lot of confusion about resizing a virtual disk, which is the main reason I wrote the wrapper.

Further more, in my XP virtual machine I can see two

vmdk files, is that normal or is a my mistake?

The vm has one vdisk only.

Do you have a snapshot? You'll probably want to merge it back to the base disk before converting.

[fauzzo]

I have made a try but I didn't get results

I went to convert, I have selected the original vm disk and I have selected a file with the same name to the desktop as Output. The process has made the job and I got two files: one with -flat added to the name and one like the original. The size of the flat one was correct but I do not understand how to restore them into my vm.

I see that the original vm disk has been corrupted and I am unable to boot from it, I have tryed to move new files into the vm and to add such new harddisk or to edit the config file to let the application see it but it doesn't help. What am I missing?

thanks

[admin]

I went to convert, I have selected the original vm

disk and I have selected a file with the same name to

the desktop as Output. The process has made the job

and I got two files: one with -flat added to the name

and one like the original. The size of the flat one

was correct but I do not understand how to restore

them into my vm.

The one "like the original" is a flat text file that describes the -flat one. The -flat one contains the actual data. You need both of them.

I see that the original vm disk has been corrupted

and I am unable to boot from it,

How did this happen? Did you not delete the snapshot?

I have tryed to move

new files into the vm and to add such new harddisk or

to edit the config file to let the application see it

but it doesn't help. What am I missing?

There's no UI to do this. Perhaps the easiest way would be to move the new files into the vmwarevm bundle and replace the old vmdk with the new one. If you provide a listing of the contents of the vmwarevm bundle ("ls -l /path/to/your/vm", e.g. "ls -l ~/Documents/Virtual\ Machines/MyVMName.vmwarevm/") in the Terminal), I can walk you through it.

[fauzzo]

thank you very much for the help!

I finally got the solution. I do not understand why the original disk was not working anymore, anyway I have deleted it and moved the new one to that container. Then I have edited the config file to restore disk name that I have messed up by deleting and adding a new hard disk from fusion gui and now all seems to work well.

thanks!