ATIH2012 Disk backup - restore to new disk failed

BosseB,

You need to be careful that people don't get confused as in Acronis speak a clone is not the same as an image.

Does the image validate, either from Windows or the recovery CD?

Is the new disk going into the same laptop or a different PC?

Some laptop drives have different geometries to standard and this can be a cause of problems.

Where did you store the image on a network drive?

***edited mistyping***

I had a problem with my HP EliteBook laptop, which suddenly shuts down after an indeterminate time of operation (0.5 to several hours). Since I really need to get on with my job and I have done a fair deal of virtualized work I decided to try to P2V the laptop until it is repaired. So I extracted the SSD hard disk from it, put it into a SATA docking station on my old (almost retired XP PC) and used ATIH2012 to make an image file of the whole SSD disk. To me that is a clone...
The XP PC was now the Acronis host and the target was a file on a USB connected LaCie 1Tb portable drive.

Next I used a different laptop (EliteBook too but from my daytime workplace and with the same i7 CPU as the broken one) and started VMWare Workstation and created a new Win7X64 guest with a blank 256 Gb drive. I connected the ISO file of my ATIH boot disk to the virtual machine and hooked up the USB drive to the new laptop as well. I created a share on the folder where the backup file resided.

Then I booted up the virtual machine to the boot CD and selected to restore to the empty disk. I connected to the host PC share via the network to access the backup file. Then I started the restore operation and it chugged along for quite some time (in fact I went to bed). Next morning the result was on screen: Failed as described in my post.

It is so sad because each and every of these operations take "forever" (or at least several hours) and I had hoped they would be fail-safe at least. But unfortunately the backup file seems to be corrupted. I tried as an experiment to extract a few Outlook PST files from it using ATIH2012 on the same PC where it was created but that operation also failed.

My aim was to be able to start my failed laptop (the problem is not on the disk) and work for a week or so in this environment until the hardware is repaired. I have done similar rescues using VMWare before, but that was with XP and also not using Acronis for backup.

Bo B

I think your better bet would have to converted the tib image to a VHD file (assuming that you selected complete disk as the image source rather than just the partition(s)). Then you could have added the VHD file to the W7 BCD either manually or via the Acronis utility if your W7 is Ultimate or above. This would have allowed you to boot directly from the VHD. Alternatively convert the VHD to a VMWare file.

Remember though that Windows will complain about incorrect drivers and may BSOD if a live OS is attached to dissimilar hardware. With XP this is easy to remedy, Vista and W7 more difficult

If you just need to access files then mounting or exploring the tib image is all you require.

There is a big difference between a clone and a disk image.

1. A disk image places used sectors of your original disk into a container file, the tib, which can be compressed and can be explored and mounted in order to gain access to individual files if needs be.

2. A clone makes a direct sector by sector copy of your drive warts and all, with no intermediate container file. It can re-apportion the existing sectors to fit or extend to a new drive.

So you mean that there is a utility to convert the tib file directly to a vmdk virtual hard disk file?
That would be so much easier to do than trying to do a restore inside a virtual machine like I did.
Unless of course it can only convert to a vhd file (Microsoft virtual pc disk file).

And I must get the thing to run because I have important software installed on this laptop that I need to use for my work.
The actual work files are safe in our version control system, but not my private files.
And today I discovered another block to accessing these:
I extracted the SSD hard disk and plugged it into my SATA docking station on my XP computer. Then I browsed my way down to Users//My Documents, but then a popup error message showed its ugly face saying that I do not have permission to look inside!
It is *MY* MyDocuments, and I am logged on to the XP PC using the exact same domain account as I was using on the Win7 laptop....
So this is another reason I need to get it running somehow.

Bo B

BosseB,

TIh 2012 can only convert to VHD, you'll need to convert that to an OVF, which I believe VMWare should be able to work with. VMWare used to have a tib converter, but they haven't updated it in quite a few years so it doesn't work with current Acronis versions.

Acronis do make a product specifically for VMWare use, but rewquires the full version ofVMWare with ESX servers - called vmProtect.

However that is no help at this moment, so if there is a way you can get VMware to recognise a VHD file or as you are currently using windows 7 attach the VHD file to the BCD (which you can do if your W7 is Ultimate or Entetrprise) you'll be able to boot straight into your XP.

The reason you are getting the permissions error is because the SSID that is attached to your files in XP isn't the same as the one for W7, this can be solved by right clicking on the files you require and adding them to your current permissions - you need to select the security tab under properties.

The security problem is not so simple because I don't even get to see the files...
As soon as I click on the folder "My Documents" the permission error appears.

Concerning the VHD issue it seems like I will have a long ways to go:
First backup the disk using TIH2012 to a TIB file (takes 3-4 hours)
Next convert TIB -> VHD, I assume this will take another number of hours and create another big file
Next let VMWARE convert from VHD to VMDK which will add to both time and disk space (don't know what OVF is)
Now hopefully VMWare WS can start from the final file.

Now that I think about it I have another issue:
As far as I can remember from when I used VirtualPC there is a size limitationb on VHD virtual disks that they can be no bigger than 128 Gb. My source disk is 240 Gb.....

The OS on the source disk is Windows 7 Professional X64 SP1, English version.
The only XP computer in this scenario is my old DELL tower that was replaced by the laptop 11 months ago. So I don't want to boot into any XP system at all, I want to resurrect the installation on the laptop.

I am probably hosed now.

Security (SID) settings for the My Documents folder should normally be inherited from its parent Username folder and, for both WinXP and Win7, those settings should also include full control for the Administrators group as well as for that specific user.

As Colin points out, the SID for the specific user won't be the reproduced under a different OS, but access for the Administrators group should be still available as a "well-known SID." (See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/243330 ) So long as you are logged in with administrator privileges, you should thus be able to take ownership of the parent Username folder and have its security settings propagated to its subfolders, including My Documents.

OVF is the Open Virtual Format, which I believe VMWare does recognise (it would allow me to use my Virtual Box vdisk (converted to OVF) on VMWare and vice versa).

Converting from tib to VHD shouldn't take as long as making the original image, it will be larger than the tib file though. I've only converted 70-80GB OS files, but I think with W7 and 2008 R2 (and probably SBS 2011) the maximum size is 2TB. The 128GB restriction was for Virtual PC 2005 running on IDE controllers, SCSI allowed the full 2TB.

I base that thought on - http://blogs.technet.com/b/ranjanajain/archive/2010/03/23/virtual-hard-… (last paragraph)