Donna’s old XPS M1330 needed a reformat and to remove the crappy Windows Vista from it. Before completely banishing the OS and all her files which she claims have been backed up. I decided to err on the side of caution and perform a full image backup of the entire drive and store it on a shared drive on my NAS. I then had the idea of restoring the full back up into a Virtual Machine so that she can access it just in case she miraculously remembers something that she needed.
Backing up on Norton Ghost 15 is quite simple, with just under 50GB of data to backup across a 100mbit LAN took just under 60 minutes. After it the imaging had been completed, it was time to restore the image to a virtual machine. As far as my limited knowledge goes, I knew there were two ways you can do the restore, one was to use the Norton Ghost System Recovery CD and restore the image that way. The other was to use Vmware’s Import feature which allows you to import third party images, Norton Ghost images (*.sv2i) being one of them.
I was originally going to post the recovery process using Symantec Recovery CD to a VMware Workstation but it took me 8 hours to get it to install, however I was getting BSOD when trying to boot the new virtual machine so I gave up on that and decided to use the VMWare Solution.
Here are the steps & screenshots on how to import your Norton Ghost 15 Image and convert to Virtual Machine:
- Open VMware Workstation > File > Import and Export. A Conversion Wizard box will appear.
- Source type: I selected Other since it is a third party image > Click on Next
- Click on Browse and locate the Norton Ghost Image and then Click Next
- This next gives you two options, the original disk size was only 160GB so I chose to convert the whole disk and maintain it’s size. Click Next
- Click Next Again
- I’ve selected other as this new virtual machine will not reside in an ESX host. Click Next
- Name and Location: Configure the fields according to your own setup, Location refers to where the vm image will be stored, make sure you have enough space in this drive to accomodate the new machine. Click Next
- Virtual Machine Options: Here I’ve selected a full conversion and selected to allocate full disk for better performance.
- Networks: This option allows you to configure how the virtual machine connects to your LAN and how many NICs you would like configure. I’ve selected Bridge mode.
- Step 3: The two boxes that you are presented here are optional, it allows you to make changes to computer name, networks, licensing, time zone etc.
- Ready to Complete: This page is the summary of the configs, check that all the details are correct before clicking Finish
- Conversion Begins. Depending on your hardware the time that it takes to convert may vary.
