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How to..Is it possible..?

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Hi,

I am a registered user of ATI 2016 + Universal Restore (I also have ATI2013 and UR).

I created a backup of a drive using the 2016 product.

The backup is of a Win 7 SP1 boot drive.

I want to restore it as a virtual machine that can run on a Win 10 Prof install.

I'm not really sure how (or if) it can be done.

Thank you for your time and help.

Bill

 

 

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Should be possible, but not sure what you mean on a Win10 Prof install if your base image your taking is going to be Win7.  Whatever your base image is, that's what will be restored to the VM.  There's no way to transition from Win 7 to Win 10 as part of the image or vitualization process.  However, once Win 7 is installed, you could then upgrade to Windows 10 and then provide a Win 10 Pro key to make it Pro (if your Win 7 is home or less - if it's enterprise or better, win 7 will upggrade to Win 10 Pro) I'm using VMmware Workstation as the example, but should be similar in other virtual applications too:

Take a full disk image of the original physical Win7 hard drive and save the image to an external drive or somehwere on the PC that will be hosting the VM so that you can point the VM to it later.  

Create you new VM as you normally would but don't supply an OS - just let it build the virtual drive.  

Mount an ISO of your ATIH offline bootable recovery media in the virtual CDROM

Boot the VM to the virtual CD rom to bring up the Acronis recovery menu.  Use it like you would on a physical machine and restore your image to the newly created virtual hard drive.

Once the image is restored, boot to the VM - should boot up.  if not, you may have to run UR the same way you just did for Acronis bootable media and generalize the newly deployed OS.  Once generalized, then boot back into Windows and you may have to install some drivers (vmware tools is usually enough).

Hi Bobbo,

OK, I understand what you're saying.

For clarity, I meant to express that I wanted the restored Win 7 to run as a VM on a Windows 10 Pro PC.

QUESTION - you said "take a full disk image" - does this mean if I chose the backup action which excluded TMP files, User TMP locations, no page file, etc, that I should re-do my backup as a full BIT IMAGE or..?

Would you kindly reply with the menu action I should take for the source backup?

Thank you for taking the time to help me understand.

Bill

 

William, you should be fine - I only recommend a full disk image to make sure the necessary paritions are included in the backup as well to make the system bootable when you push it back.  If you take the image offline, things like the pagefile, etc won't be in the image anyway as those are loaded with Windows.  

For me, I almost always take a full offline disk image - just so I have everything in case I need to revert back to the exact same thing.  When you restore, you can still choose to restore only certain partions, and/or exclude files and/or folders, but it's really personal preference.  To take the entire image, you would select  Backup >>> Disk and Partiton Backup >>>>Click the box at the top of Disk 1 (or whatever one is your main disk) and make sure that all of the parition boxes under it are selected as well.

When you recover in the VM, select "whole disks and partions", and push the entire disk back with all paritions as well.  Normally that will work just fine.  If you do have a problem booting, try going back and restoring all paritions, but leave off the one that says MBR and track 0. 

Check out the guide here:

Recovering your system to a new disk under bootable media