Make backup image in VM and restore to physical HW

[Micik]

Hello to all,

I have made a .tib image from physical machine and restore it successfully in VMWare Player v15.

The guest OS is win XP and I need this because of some legacy sw. Now, I have installed vmware tools and everything is OK. I have made some changes in the sw in the VM in the sw application and test it.

Now, since VM use virtual network adapters, of course, old real hw adapters are now hidden in the device manager of the VM because they are not present in the virtual machine anymore. These adapters have some static IPs on original machine (I can verify this on virtual machine in windows registry). So nothing is removed from the device manager (at least not by myself).

Now, my plan is to make another .tib image, now from the VM, so basically I'm backuping up the VM guest now, and I want to restore this image on a new HDD in the original physical machine (I don't want to mess up original hdd).

Since I diidn't uninstall any drivers in the guest OS that was running on the VMWare Player, and some new drivers are installed for the graphic and virtual network cardsby vmware itself, I wonder if restored system would work on original physical machine.

In theory it should work, since windows would recognize all hw that originally was installed in the first place, and I should have all orignal drivers and settings for the gpu card and network cards. Is that right?

What is your experience, did you have a situation like this? 

[kasper]

You may be able to use Clonezilla to do this.

[bluefirestorm]

I don't know about the V2P restore question.

But in general, it would be better to remove devices that are no longer present from the Device Manager (whether it is P2V, V2P, V2V). For NICs with static IPs, they can become ghost/phantom devices and still cause IP address conflict in the network.

To remove the ghost NIC from the Windows XP VM what you do is

Open command prompt
set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
devmgmt.msc
And then select Show hidden devices from the Device Manager. And then uninstall the hidden NIC and other hardware devices that no longer exist in the VM.

With the environment variable you would be able to see all the stuff that used to be connected to the old XP machine (whether it is modem, USB device, monitor, graphic card, etc).

[Micik]

Thank you. I was able to successfully restored image made in vm to the physical hw. After that I have removed hidden vmware adapters just like bluefirestorm suggested and I also removed vmware tools. So far, everything works fine.

[kasper]

'Show Hidden' is also an option in the GUI.

Yes, remove unused devices before the move.    Uninstall VMWare tools before the move.

Most important, make sure the boot device is the same type from virtual to physical

(sata/nvme/scsi/etc).

If not, read up on how to handle it.