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Launching a disc image (.tib) file using a virtual machine

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Hi, I was sent a .tib file to verify some of the software on it. I was told I could use Acronis 2019 to view the hard drive image but I haven't been able to get it working. The image is of a 7gb hard drive running Windows XP. I'm attempting to launch it using VMware with windows XP. I have read that it needs to be at least Windows 7 to be used with VMware so maybe that's the problem?

I've tried converting the .tib file to .iso and when I use the .iso file to launch the VM, it starts to launch windows before launching Acronis asking for a disc to be recovered but nothing shows up in the file.

Is there a way to view the .tib files using a virtual machine?

Thanks for any help, I've never used this software before.

0 Users found this helpful

Eric, welcome to these User Forums.

Any Acronis .TIB file is simply a backup archive containing an image of the source disk & partitions therefore there is more work before you can use this to launch the OS contained in the archive.

If you install ATI 2019 on your computer you would be able to explore the contents of the archive using either the ATI GUI or via the shell integration with Windows File Explorer.

To use the archive more directly with VMWare, you would need to either convert it to a format that VMWare will recognise such as .VHD / VHDX, or else would need to boot the VM from the ATI Rescue media created by ATI 2019 and restore the contents to a virtual disk within the VM, then get this working as a Win XP OS system.

See the following resources for more information:

KB 59986: Acronis True Image 2018: how to create a virtual machine with an existing virtual hard disk

KB 60209: Acronis True Image 2018: configuring Windows native boot from VHD/VHDX files created by "Convert to VHD" feature

Forum topic: Trouble restoring XP backup to Virtual Machine

Forum topic: How to convert .tib to VM?