Unable to Convert to VMWare Workstation

Hi All,

Having difficulties with Acronis backup and Recovery 10.0 Server b.11639 on Server 2003 x86 SP2.

We have a 1.81TB RAID-5 Disk array, which our C: (system) drive is partitioned to 279GB. This is the only partition on the array we need to backup, and part of our disaster recovery strategy is to convert to a VMWare Workstation image.

After speaking to Acronis support (case#00810802 ), they have identified a fault with Acronis that will not let a VMWare workstation image be created as part of an Acronis backup job, as the originating disk (or array in this case) is larger than 950GB (limitation of VMWare Workstation) - even though the disk image itself is only 279GB. This was a little frustrating, however Acronis promised it would be fixed in the next scheduled update.

Their advise was to run a manual conversion from the .TIB file (as a new job), and resize the output drive to something less than 950GB. We have tried every possible combinations of commands, but the 279GB C: Image will not convert to a VMWare disk image, even if we resize the output drive to 200GB. Acronis seems to pick up the fact that the originating image came from a 1.81TB disk, and instantly refuses to go any further.

Has anyone any ideas on how we can convert our backup images to VMWare Workstation disks - Ideally automated as part of a routine? The only real solution we have come up with is to pull out all of the array disks and replace them with smaller ones (not really feasible though).

Any ideas / thoughts / solutions would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

John.