Imaging a VM, What are my disk drives

webmanoffesto · 08 Dec 2010

Imaging a VM, What are my disk drives

I'm doing a Windows 7 tutorial. In it I'm imaging a W7 Virtual Machine. I rebooted the VM and booted from my physical WinPE CD.

The book SPTK 70-680 (Ian McLean) gives pretty good instructions but I have different drive letters than what’s in the book.
The book says to enter
e:\imagex.exe /capture c: d:\images\myimage.wim “Canberra Win7 Install” /compress fast /verify

But then I have to change the drive letters in the command. How do I see "my computer" from the WinPE dot prompt?

When I booted the VM off of my WinPE physical CD, then I see
D: system files, no label
E: CD ROM
X: boot

When my VM is booted into W7 (not off of WinPE CD) I see
C: system files
D: CD drive
E: a new drive I created, because I want to send the image there.

I need to know
1. The drive with the physical CD - E:
2. The drive letter of what I will image
3. The drive letter of where I send the image

How can I do that?

----------------------------------
Virtual Box 3.2.12
Windows 7 Enterprise
Book: Exam 70-680, Configuring Windows 7, Self Paced Training Kit, Ian McLean

jimbo45 · 08 Dec 2010

Hi there
The best (and simplest) way of imaging a VM system IMO is to install the imaging software on it and save the image to a Network drive either on the HOST machine or on your LAN.

Otherwise just save the VHD in Windows / Linux -- doesn't matter. The Virtual HDD is just DATA to the HOST OS.

For consistency I just run ACRONIS TRUE IMAGE on the VM to save the image. To restore just boot the "bootable media" when you power on the VM and restore the image just like you would do on a real machine.

Any decent imaging backup software should work so long as you can boot from a "stand alone" device such as a CD / DVD / USB disk / stick.

Cheers
jimbo