Ghost disk image install

Has anyone sucessfully used Ghost to create a working bootable VM?

I've found the posts that suggest to turn off VT-x support to get the Ghost app to run, and that does indeed work. My problem is that after sucessful imaging; the VM will apparently hang just after the little gray 'Starting Windows' progress bar completes. (tried a W2K and XP image we use all the time on our Dells)

I just need to know if the issue is mine alone, or if there is a trick or currrent limitation of compatibility???

Thanks for any help,
Darrin

 

Actually your real PC hardware is quit different from Parallels VM hardware. To boot from real PC disk image you should do some reconfiguration first - change HAL dll and number of drivers. To do so you could attach this image as 2-nd HDD to working VM and do reconfiguration.

 

Well, I'm pretty quick with the Macs, but I'm lost with your suggestion. Are you saying there are some files on the image that need altered?

 

I tried running Ghost with VT-x turned on, and it reset the machine... didn't even kernel panic, computer just powered off like it was hit by a truck. But that was beta6 and I've been too scared to try that again. Next time I'll try it with VT-x turned off..

Andrew means that your Ghost image will be expecting very different hardware than what Parallels emulates. I had thought Windows would find this and compensate by loading all new drivers automatically when it boots under the VM for the first time, but it sounds like this didn't work for you. What else do we do??? Have you tried booting in Safe Mode?? I don't know what else to try, but using Ghost images of Windows is important for me too. A quick guide or HOWTO would really help... I just purchased Parallels for Mac and hope a guide for using Ghost will be created...

 

Hi Andrew,

I'm in the same boat, in terms of getting a blue panic/STOP screen from Windows right after the progress bar... Is there an FAQ, HOWTO or other write-up on the web somewhere for dealing with the reconfiguration you suggest? I don't expect you guys to write one up, but if you know of one it wouldn't hurt to link to it.

Hmm... Just like replacing a motherboard, I wonder if this would work:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;824125

{UPDATE - Although the process worked it resulted in no improvement}

 

HAL dll should be replaced with non-ACPI one before trying to boot captured image.

 

Sysprep

Sysprep is what you use with Ghost when changing hardware. Start with
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;302577

It can be a little cumbersome to get started, but once you have it working, it's smooth and would probably fulfill your need.

 

My companies XP disk image was 'syspreped', so the image creation is typical and assumingly universal.

I found a good article that explains how change the HAL.dll (below). This is pretty easy to do after you have imaged a VM, just boot from an OEM XP disk and enter recovery mode. The you can extract different dll's from the CD to the unbootable VM and cross your fingers.

Unfortunatley, none of them worked for me. I tried every HAL dll mentioned in this article with both single and MP kernels. Crap!

http://www.joshie.com/~jlevitsk/blog/archives/000122.html

 

can you provide more details?

Andrew, I would be most interested to learn in more detail how to get my corporate WinXP install into Parallels. Can you provide more details, i.e. what reconfiguration steps do I need to perform and how? I already have a ghost image that I would like to use. thanks!

 

I'm a big Ghost fan, but in Parallel's case you don't really need it...just copy Parallel's image files and voila, you have a backup! I keep a copy of my primary XP image on my backup hard drive for backup. If you're using Windows XP, for example, open Finder and navigate to your username's directory. So if my username is kaido, I would do the following:

kaido > Library > Parallels > winxp

In the winxp folder will be 2 files: winxp.hdd and winxp.pvs. winxp.hdd is the actual hard disk image and winxp.pvs is the configuration file. All you have to do to make a backup (make sure Parallels is closed and is not running!) is to copy that winxp folder containing those two files. I just tested out my backup image from my external 7200rpm hard drive and it works fine, you just have to choose to open the different image within Parallels (before you boot into XP). It couldn't get any simpler Is that what you're looking to do?

 

Absolutely understood you can backup a VM by copying the hdd file elsewhere.

BUT, 'capnswing' and I want to use an existing XP disk image. In our corporation we have a standard distribution disk image for OS X and for XP, this ensures everyone in the enterprise has a system built to the same specification. We would *very much* like to use that same XP disk image on our Parallels using Macs. Thus, ensuring that those instalations of XP are of the same specification of the other 2,500 PC in our enterprise.

I certainly don't want to have to maintain a separate XP image just for the Macs and try to keep it in sync with the updates to our 'regular' XP image.

D.

 

Although I was able to restore our standard XP Ghost image to Parallels, it does seem to lag a bit. I haven't actually tried a clean install of XP yet, so I'm not certain if it's my image, the HAL workaround, the MacBook, an incomplete install of the Parallel Tools, my Parallels settings, or Parallels itself.

Still testing it, but other than known limitations (no iSight, CD audio, ...), no complications yet.

 

WCC --
Are you saying that you DID have to monkey with the HAL to get it to work? Can you please describe what that was???

I restored our Ghost image and it would never boot. I then booted from DVD and tried every combination of HAL possible from the web link above, none ever worked.

 

For some reason, my first problem was I couldn't get past the Parallels BIOS screen after refreshing. I ended up booting to Windows PE and replacing the boot.ini file with one from a clean installation of Windows. Even though they were almost identical (I use noexecute instead of optin), doing that allowed me to get to the Windows logo. Didn't do too much testing to figure why I had this problem.

From there, it would freeze, reboot, or crash Parallels at the logo due to wrong HAL. I rebooted into Windows PE and copied the Standard PC hal.dll and ntoskrnl.exe to the windows\sytem32 folder. I think there was a post-SP2 Windows Update that updated the ntoskrnl.exe file, so my file dates and sizes were:

03/01/2005 02:59 PM 2,179,328 ntoskrnl.exe
08/03/2004 10:59 PM 105,472 hal.dll

After rebooting, it went through Setup as expected. Our sysprep.inf file tells it to redetect HALs, but like our Dell GX200 PCs, it chooses the wrong ones. So after Setup finished, I needed to reboot into Windows PE again to copy the same files over. Reboot, and it gets into Windows fine.


Edit:

Extra info, if it helps. Acceleration high, VT on. Used Windows PE 2005 and Ghost32 8.3 to refresh. Image worked fine without any HAL issues from our 440BX PCs to the MacBook w/ Boot Camp, except for the Dell GX200 as mentioned earlier.

 

Any updates? I am about to try same thing

Hi darrinp and all,

were you able to use your Ghost image and put it on Parallels?
I have just started trying it out and I am using Ghost 2003. Once the virtual machine boots from PC-DOS that Ghost 2003 installs as a boot environment, then the Ghost-ing starts, and (as has been reported by others) the whole machine (the MacBook-not just Parallels) reboots.

Has anyone made some progress?

Many thanks in advance?

Mitsaoua

 

So a few months have gone by and here's another user desperately wanting to know if this issue is all sorted out. Has anybody had success and figured out a straight forward recipe to make this work? While I'm a power Mac user, I really don't get all the low-level PC stuff so if you do have instructions please keep them simple e.g. don't just say I need to fix some file, please also say where the file is and what needs fixing.

Many thanks - Mick.

 

Here's a kludge I've used:

Grab your enterprise standard Ghost image and apply it to a physical PC. Then use Transporter to bring that PC into a Parallels VM as your "virgin" deployment VM. Depending upon your enterprise's deployment policies, you may also need to partially devolve the transfered VM to a more "virgin" state before using for future installations.

I know devolving the VM can be a time consuming pain depending upon how complex your enterprise image is scripted for low-intervention deployment and how strict are the polices. So this idea may not work for you. My deployment image is rather simply scripted, policies slack and have a much lower users count.

Unfortunately, I think it's either something like the above kludge or recreate the enterprise Ghost image from scratch as a VM and maintain completely separate image lines. Transporter unlike VMware Converter Starter does not read Ghost images (developers...hint, hint).

Another kludge I've been thinking about testing is taking my deployment Ghost image and converting it to a VMware VM using VMware Converter Starter. Then do a second conversion using Transporter. Don't know how much of a mess that would be but if I find time to play, I'll post the results.

 

Hi again,

After I load up my employer's coprporate XP image and try for the big reboot, I don't even make it out of the text on the screen world. He's dead, Jim. I've poked around in the WinPE CD they loaned me and in \i386\system32 they have all the different HAL files etc. that I could want to experiment with. However, for the life of me I can't figure out how to bring up a DOS window (or equivalent) and copy those files into the Parallels VM.

I'm desperate here - I can certainly boot up a regular XP using the CD from some random Dell laptop, but I'm missing all the other stuff preconfigured in my company's image and that's crippling me. Aside from being graciously lent the WinPE CD and being told how to access the Ghost images on the network, I'm STUCK :-(.

Anybody?

Just a thought - Can I create TWO Parallels VMs. One a regular XP thing, and the other the corporate image. Then can you do the Transporter thing between them? Not clear I really get what I'm talking about but maybe it'll inspire some more thought.

 

OK, I got it working!! The problem was that once Ghost has restored the image into the WinPE environment, WinPE didn't know that it had a C drive transplanted into it when Ghost was done. As such you couldn't copy any files into the C drive because WinPE didn't know it existed.
So here's my procedure:
In Parallels, do Edit -> Virtual Machine
Choose the Options resource and then the booting Tab
Choose the boot sequence 'CDROM, Hard Disk, Floppy'
Create a virtual machine and then boot from the WinPE CD.
A DOS window will come up within which you can run Ghost. In my company, I had to type in a command so that WinPE could see the image on the corporate network. That command (for me) was:
net use g: \\machine_name\path_to_images
I then had to authenticate
Run Ghost, point it to the image on the G drive and when it finishes (75 minutes in my case) select Reset Computer from the dialog box. Because of the boot sequence setting in Parallels, it'll reboot into WinPE again, and not the broken C drive image. At this point WinPE will now see the C drive.
In the DOS window that comes up I entered the following two commands to copy the the correct two replacement files from the CD (X: drive) to the C: drive
copy x:\i386\system32\hal.dll c:\WINDOWS\system32
copy x:\i386\system32\ntoskrnl.exe c:\WINDOWS\system32
I've also read that replacing the boot.ini file was required, but that wasn't the case for me (the corporate boot.ini file and the one I have in a working Parallels XP system were identical).
After that I stopped the virtual machine and changed the boot sequence back to 'Hard Drive, CDROM, Floppy'. I also took the opportunity to clone the VM (File -> Clone) so that I could (after zipping it) save it to a dvd so I wouldn't have to go through this again later.

Now start the VM and it all works

Hope this helps somebody.

Mick.

 

Thank you for you information Mick
I didn't use (or know) WinPE, but basically I created a ghost boot disk with the RTL8029 driver, used parallels to boot an empty VM with the floppy, pulled the image from the server. Boot into WinXP Recovery console whne the ghosting's done, and then copy over the hal.dll and ntoskrnl.exe from the CD over, and it worked!