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How to convert TIH2012 full disk backup tib to VMWare vmdk?

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I have a crashed laptop with a fully intact hard disk (power supply problem not allowing the laptop to start). So I installed TIH2012 on my old XP PC and extracted the hard disk from the laptop and made a full disk backup. The SSD disk is 256 Gb in size and is about 50% full.
The backup completed successfully and produced a TIB file about 55 Gb in size.

Now I want to use this for a VMWare Workstation 7 virtual machine so I can get at my application data but I am stuck at converting the TIB to a VMDK. I have TIH2012 with Universal Restore so I figured I could try to restore the image to an empty vmdk drive inside the virtual machine by booting off the TIH2012 rescue CD, which I have made. But this fails mid-way through the restore process (with the TIB file on my XP PC and accessed through the network share by TIH2012). The error claims that the backup is corrupted but it is not...
I have seen mentioned that there might exist utilities to convert the TIB file directly to VMDK without using the restore operation of TIH2012, but I have found none.
The closest I have seen is a way to convert to Microsoft VHD file format, but that will not work since VHD is limited to disks of size 128 Gb or smaller and my disk is 256 Gb, so it is twice the size of the biggest possible VHD disk.
So going the way over a VHD file is not possible because of this.

EDIT:
After googling a bit I found that VHD file size limit is way higher than 128 Gb, it is VirtualPC that is unable to handle bigger VHD disk files! So I will try the disk2vhd program to make a virtual disk out of the physical one and go from there.

Any advice please?
I really do want to use the backup image in a virtual machine in order to get hold of my environment while the laptop is away for repair!

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BosseB,

I use VirtualBox so I can only give some general thoughts on how to do this. For TIH2012 -

1. Convert the tib file to VHD. You could of course if running Vista or W7 Ultimate, boot directly from the VHD file or use MS Virtual PC.

2. Convert the VHD file to OVF which VMWare is supposed to support. Once in OVF format VMWare should be able to run the machine directly or be able to convert to VMDK, unless VMWare can work directly with VHD files.

This probably won't be of much help to you now, but there is an Acronis product which will work directly with VMWare so long as you have the full paid for version of VMWare, which is Acronis vmProtect 6.0, this talks directly to a VMWare ESX server. Don't get too excited though as the price is just a piddling US$499.00

BosseB:

Have you looked at VMWare's free converter? http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/

It can convert various things to VMDK format, so if you can get your tib file in one of its supported input formats the converter will convert this to VDMK.

I used it to convert a version 10 tib file directly to VMDK format, but I don't think that the converter yet supports the newer tib file formats.

@BosseB

You may find this info helpful: http://forum.acronis.com/forum/24164 this is how I got VHD file converted from a TIB to run in VMWare

or if you want to try VirtualBox then https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=22422&sid=50a4b495c66… may be of use as while converting the disk IIRC can be shrunk. Clone-VDI will convert FHD's into VirtualBox VDI files.