Symantec Ghost or Acronis TrueImage

M

mdickey

Junior Member
With VMware on my PC, I can create images of the virtual HD using Ghost, and I can also build new VMs using Ghost images. I've found this to be quite useful when switching between physical iron and virtual machines.

I tried booting Beta2 with a Ghost (8.0) boot CD and as soon as the autoexec.bat calls ghost.exe my Mac reboots. Not the VM, but OSX. I'm running 10.4.6 on a MacBook Pro, 2Ghz dual-core, 2GB memory.

Has anyone had luck using Ghost with Parallels? Or alternatively, Acronis' TrueImage software (sounds like this does the same thing, perhaps better, but I haven't tried it yet).

Thanks,
-Mike
 
Acronis works fine to image a drive. Just like one would do normally. Restoring from a backup of a previous system is a bit more involved, but also works. The hardest thing I had was to wrap my arconis backup files within a disk image. It was very frustrating to see them reside right there on the same disk as my guest os and not be able to access them. I ended up making DVD9 iso images in Nero on a PC. I mounted them as 2 cdrom's (which you can do simultaneously) and then copied the files do a secondary HD within the guest OS. I then added another drive in parralels and used acronis to extract them to the new drive. I then set the new drive as my boot drive (in parallels) and booted from the winxp cd and did a repair install. I also tried to boot from the Acronis CD and restore the backup files to the original hard disk image I made. That took a long time but looked like it was working before I killed it. Doing it in windows ws much faster.
 
Acronis

I downloaded a copy of Acronis (Workstation) and it works for me too! Seems much cleaner than Ghost, but I can't get it to resize partitions during restore (even though the documentations says it is supported). I know this is sort of off-topic but I'm trying to restore to a new Parallels VM with a larger HD since the disk tool is not yet available. Any ideas on what I might be doing wrong would be appreciated!

About Ghost, it definitely does not seem to be compatible. Parallels: if you decide not to support it that is OK, but trying to use it probably should not cause your Mac to reboot. ;-) This seems like a more serious problem than just a compatilibity issue..
 
ghost.....wow what a crash

so I have been reading that it does not work, but I am stubborn and wanted to see.....

i spent most of the night hunting down what i needed, located a ghost boot floppy, installed xp created a blank fdd, format'd it for sys....

stripped it down copied what i needed from the .imz

then shut down the xp vm (btw file sharing from xp to mac worked great)

booted the linux vm with that .fdd it started fine, cd'd into the ghost dir and kicked off ghost.exe

***poof***

big, black, landscape screen on the macbook pro......

yep it is verified ghost will crash it like nothing else, and FAST too. it was like hitting a light switch

now i wonder if I can take the .gho image I am trying to restore, restore it to another server.

then use Acronis to image it, startup (I imagine) off boot floppy and restore to the vm inside parallels.... Any ideas?

-ee
 
@mdickey

Are you saying that when you start out with a bigger drive and an image from a smaller drive that it won't expand to the bigger drive?

Whenever I do a restore in this situation it asks me how I want the new drive partitioned. Do you have the trial version? It might be disabled in the trial version, but in TI 8.0 it is for sure supported.
 
i'm already backing up the osx volume that contains parallels to a disk image (using superduper).

do i still need to backup the parallels windows environment?
 
True Image

I have the full version of True Image 9 Workstation. I booted from CD and tried to do a disk restore; it did not give me any options for resizing partitions.

I just received a support email back from Acronis saying that you have to restore each partition one-by-one and then restore the MBR manually to resize. Supposedly restoring the partitions individually is what gives you the resize options. Haven't tried it yet but that is probably what I was doing differently.

Here is the response I received from Acronis support:

If you restore an image archive of the entire hard disk including the master boot record (MBR), then you cannot resize the partitions. There are two possible workarounds, if you need to restore the partitions with resizing while the MBR is also restored.

- Restore the entire hard disk without resizing and then restore each of the partitions separately setting the proper size for it and overwriting the previously restored one.

- Restore the partitions separately resizing them and then fix the MBR manually by one of the below ways:

1) Boot the computer from Windows 95/98/ME Startup Disk and run "fdisk /mbr" command;
2) Boot the computer from Windows 2000/XP Installation CD and run "fixmbr" command in Recovery Console.


Please let me know if you know of an easier solution. This seems strange and overly complicated to me, since Ghost always let me change all my partition sizes during a restore.
 
Ghost works if you disable VT-x in the VM before running. Then just enable VT again after ghost is finished. Still, this should get fixed.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top