P to V (Physical to Virtual) Migration with Acronis and Virtual PC
March 25th, 2009
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I was working to migrate users to our work domain and as part of the process we like to reinstall Windows on the workstations after logging their applications, settings, and any other user data. This is usually a fairly easy process, but occasionally you run into a situation where a user had settings or an application that they cannot live without. Even though we have a good backup of their data sometimes it is more helpful to have their old machine sitting around. That’s not usually feasible and since we prefer to do the Windows re-install in place. Just to be safe I took an Acronis image of the user’s old installation in this case.
I took the Acronis image, fired up Microsoft Virtual PC, created a new Virtual Machine, and booted up with the Acronis Boot CD in the VM. I then restored the image over the network to the virtual machine. After the process completed it would not boot. I wasn’t totally surprised by this, but was hopeful that Safe Mode would at least let me in to blow up the drivers and have Windows install the base drivers for their VM but no luck there. Safe mode refused to boot into Windows as well.
I tried using ERD Commander but none of the utilities in there did anything for me so I was a bit stuck. I then remembered that in past XP troubleshooting I have occasionally had a non-bootable machine that was rendered bootable by doing an XP repair installation. I popped in my XP disc (in this case a XP SP3 slipstreamed disc), started up the setup, and selected to repair the XP installation. It proceeded to delete the drivers and other XP system files and started to run through the XP installation process. I wasn’t that concerned about long term usability as I just needed to export out a certificate and private key so as long as it functioned and allowed me to open IE, export the keys and save them on the network I was set.
After the repair installation ran it booted into Windows. It was griping about not being Genuine Windows and that it needed to be activated, but it was working enough to get what I needed. I grabbed my files and shut it down.
It was really a pretty slick experience: Backed up to image (I’m sure Ghost or other imaging products would work equally as well), created a VM, restored image to the VM, ran Windows XP repair installation, booted to Windows and grabbed the files needed. I’m also pretty confident that if you needed to keep the machine active and use it for any length of time it would work just fine assuming you activated Windows and went through that whole process. My guess is that if you used the same service pack level media that you were already running on would give you the best experience with long term use, and I’m sure your milage here would vary. Also, my last hypothesis here is that if you were to delete most of (if not all of) the system specific drivers from device manager before you captured the image you may be able to boot up right back into windows and have it re-install the drivers on the fly. I’ll try this at some point in the future and report back.