I am thinking about starting from scratch in rebuilding my HD setup on a virtual drive. In this case I would use MS's Virtual PC.  It is my wish, while continuing to use my current setup on the main drive in my desktop to rebuild a new setup on the virtual drive? Then when finished with all the software setups or installs, could I use Ghost (2003) or Terabyte's Image for Linux to make an image of the new virtual drive setup? Would it be possible thereafter to use, or copy that image to a fresh drive in the same box that I could boot up and use with all my software recently set up on it. If this was possible, I would have the least interruption of my work while at the same time intermittently working on the new setup. Since my knuckles are still smarting from a recent reprimand on this forum, I promise not to discuss these questions or any answers with anyone other than in the open format herein ... sincerely
Jerry aka/Jer

@ Jerry aka Jer

TeraByte has a web page on creating a VirtualPC machine from a physical WinXP or Vista machine. There is nothing on the reverse procedure which is what you are planning.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/howto/index.htm

"Would it be possible thereafter to use, or copy that image [of the virtual machine] to a fresh drive in the same box that I could boot up and use..."

I've never tried it, but it looks like the tutorial, "Installing Windows Drivers with TBOSDT for DOS/TBOS" (on the same page as Brian's link) might be what Jerry is looking for.

As I read that tutorial, Jerry would need to clone his rebuilt virtual machine to the new physical hard disk, get the right storage drivers for his physical machine (e.g., SATA drivers?), use the tutorial's method to get the storage drivers installed, then boot the new hard disk to safe mode and deal with any other driver issues (video, sound, et al).

I am a novice here, so bear with me. Are we saying that any image of the virtual drive would not pick or include the the drivers? It is desired that any image created would be transferred to a new hard drive, but in the same computer with same MB, etc

Jerry

"It is desired that any image created would be transferred to a new hard drive, but in the same computer with same MB, etc"

Ah, but that's the point--it's not the same computer.  A virtual machine is a different computer--with a different video adapter, different sound adapter, different network adapter... sometimes even a different storage subsystem.

All of those devices are emulated in Virtual PC, and are (usually) not the same as the real devices in your physical computer.  Even the BIOS and motherboard chipset are emulated.  For example, XP installed in a virtual machine will think the machine has a S3 Trio video card, regardless of your physical video card, so setup will install the S3 driver.  If you subsequently clone the XP system from the virtual machine to the physical machine, XP will recognize the "machine" it is now on no longer has a S3 video adapter, and you'll have to deal with installing the drivers for the "found new hardware" devices XP will discover on the physical computer.

Virtualization isn't really the stumbling block here.  Think of a virtual machine as simply a different computer, with different hardware from your real computer.  What you're dealing with is the same problem as cloning XP from an old computer to a new computer with different hardware.

Jerry, if I understand your objective correctly, you wish to perform a virtual-to-physical (V2P) backup image restore.  I don’t believe that any edition of Ghost has this capability, although Backup Exec System Recovery and ShadowProtect Desktop do (and maybe other products, of which I am not aware).

I have not performed a V2P restore, but have done several P2V restores (in Windows XP and Windows Vista on VMware Workstation with ShadowProtect) that have worked.

THANKS ... to all of you on this one. I am still learning. As can be deciphered from my post, I had a totally different concept of what a virtual is. Your post Dan helped clear this up and Pleo has turned me to looking in a different direction ... or maybe to even giving up on this one.

Jerry,

I haven't tried a Virtual to Physical restore but I have used the script that Dan mentioned.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/howto/howto-drvins-tbosdt-dos.htm

My most interesting restore was from an 8 year old Gateway computer with IDE HDs to a 2 year old Dell computer with SATA HDs. Your restore would follow the sequence Dan outlined. I think it's possible and it would be simple to test. Install your OS to the Virtual machine, image the Virtual machine, restore the image to a spare HD, run the script and change the HAL if you have a dual core processor. The OS should boot and run the "found new hardware" sequence. If everything is OK you could then decide whether it's worth proceeding with installing programs etc to the Virtual machine.

Have a look at the video (Create a VirtualPC Machine from a Physical XP Machine) to see what you will need to do in reverse.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/howto/index.htm

Thanks to all for their observations on the question. Sounds all a bit complicated to a novice, and, perhaps requiring some additional outlay of ca$h for appropriate software. For now, I guess I'll have to put this project on the shelf and come back to it later. I do have an extra hard drive and swapping it ... in and out with my current system drive as I rebuild might be the best approach
Jer

@ Jerry aka Jer


Quote:

I do have an extra hard drive and swapping it ... in and out with my current system drive as I rebuild might be the best approach

As all things with PC computers--there's usually more than one way to approach a project--

Does your system allow you to select which HDD you boot from--some of the newer ones do.  You could simply change which HDD is booted from, and then you'd have two parallel systems to work from.  You'd have to work out exactly how to do that--I don't have such a system, so can't say what issues or problems you may have to work out!

Alternatively, I have used *multi-booting*--this is where you have separate OS systems installed on a single system--and depending on how you *multi-boot* (there are multiple ways!)--the two (or more) OSs are booted independently from each other--so you select which system to boot up to.  When I first switched to WinXP from Win98se--that's how I did it--experimented with WinXP until I was comfortable that everything was working okay--and booting back to Win98se as my main working OS.  I've not booted to Win98se in a couple years now!