I have been trying to create a workstation recovery option from the nightly images stored on our WHS2011 server. Scenario: Workstation 4 fails with a hard drive problem or a virus. Instead of taking the time to do a complete (bare-metal) restore from the server, I was thinking why can't we boot from a prepared USB stick with XP live installed and then run a portable version of VirtualBox to create a virtual session booting from the image on the server. Can this be done? Naturally, the folder on the server where the images are stored will be shared. Do I need to install the native
drivers from the image into a package for the VirtualBox host? If so, how can this be done. It just seems to me that this would be an easy and very quick way to get a workstation up and running and then after hours the problem can be fixed with a new drive, then shutdown the virtual system, saving it's contents and restore the image back to the workstation's hard drive. I simply do not know how this could be done and then tested on a virtual server with a virtual workstation running on the same network. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
