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VHD to HDD?

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Hi Guys

This is a bit of a here there and everywhere post since it concerns a few different things, but basically heres the long story:

We are a school whos server is on the fritz, after much tooing and froing with HP, they have decided that our storage controller on the mobo has gone. The server is still running but with only 1 disk online out of our RAID.

We have 2 spare drives that wed obviously like to use but with the storage controller being down we cannot add them to the raid, we have decided to purchase an add in raid card and build a fresh array.

I am using disk2vhd to create a vhd of our live hard disk, what i then plan to do is create a new raid using the 2 new drives and applying the vhd i have already created to this new raid

I have done some research and it seems acronis software can do this but i just wanted a confirmation of what i am doing is possible before i go ahead and make a purchase of acronis.

if anything is not clear please dont hesitate to reply and ill clear the confusion up

Steve

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Stephen,

Are you asking if True Image can image your complete disk to a VHD file and then back to a physical disk?

The answer is yes, but it is multi stepped, you might be better looking at ABR11.5 Workstation as this can make both a disk image and a VHD of the image at the same time, saving you a couple of steps.

I'm not sure from a RAID perspective and you haven't mentioned which OS you are running, but with W7 Ultimate/Enterprise and all W8's that you can actually boot from the VHD, just by adding it to the Windows' boot manager, this would save a double conversion from VHD -> tib -> physical.

Hi Colin

Thanks

Our server is windows server 2003 standard (i know ;P), i have already created the vhd file using disk2vhd from microsoft. My question was weather i could use acronis to extract the vhd onto a physical disk, i would be creating the new raid and such before this would be done

Steve

Stephen Padgett wrote:

Hi Colin
< My question was weather i could use acronis to extract the vhd onto a physical disk, i would be creating the new raid and such before this would be done

Recovering a VHD is a two part process, True Image an dABR11.5 for that matter, would convert the VHD back to a tib file and it is using the tib file that you would start the restore, hence why I suggested just booting from a VHD if you had an OS that allows that.

I have occasionally had problems where a Microsoft made VHD can't be recovered by (in my case ) ABR11.5, but others can. Personally I would use TI or ABR11.5 to make the image in the first place.

The problem is though, if you've already made the VHD, how will you be adding the drivers for restoring purposes? If the VHD copy does not include the RAID drivers, I'm not sure that it would boot. It hink you would need to build the RAID after you have recovered the image.

Hi Colin

I will probably remake the VHD and add the raid drivers and such to the server via the disk that comes with the card beforehand, i dont know if it will be possible to make the raid after i have recovered the vhd to the new disk as ill be setting up the raid as raid 1.

I may investigate the possibility of upgrading the server to 2012 and then using hyperv to host the server vhd i create, this is something i will most likely test on one of my more up to date servers

Thanks!