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  1. #1
    DF VIP Member gandalf72's Avatar
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    Help taking an image of a server and virtual hard disks and putting onto a different pc

    Hi all, just wondering if there was anyway to take an image of a server 2012 r2 and virtual pc's and put it onto different hardware with free software?

    What I have done is buy an old pc, but it has some great software on there and would like to convert this to a training pc short term. What I would like to do is take an image of it first of all so I can put the image back on it without losing apps or operating system.

    Next thing I would like to do is I can get access to a pc that has server 2012 on it with some virtual pc's. What I would like to do is find some way of taking an image of it and puting on my training pc which has different hardware. Is there free software or can anyone maybe point me in the direction via a pm on how to do this please if it is not possible to do that in the open forum.

    Thanks in advance

  2. #2
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    beerman's Avatar
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    Default Re: taking an image of a server and virtual hard disks and putting onto a different p

    Thanks to beerman

    gandalf72 (17th July 2016)  


  3. #3
    DF VIP Member gandalf72's Avatar
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    Default Re: taking an image of a server and virtual hard disks and putting onto a different p

    Thanks for the above but that will not work for me due to data being uploaded to cloud first. Is there any other solutions?

  4. #4
    DF VIP Member plug1's Avatar
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    Default Re: taking an image of a server and virtual hard disks and putting onto a different p

    Clone the hard drive ?

    Thanks to plug1

    gandalf72 (18th July 2016)  


  5. #5
    DF VIP Member chizh's Avatar
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    Default Re: taking an image of a server and virtual hard disks and putting onto a different p

    Like plug1 says. Just clone the drive in its entirety. There should be plenty of free sw to do that.

    I've recently had occasion to salvage a failing MSDOS IDE drive that was failing on one of our CNC machines at work.

    I created a guest virtualbox with a 2GB vdi and then installed DOS etc from images and then recovered the original HDD to the image.
    Once I was happy I'd salvaged the data I had the problem of getting the virtual MSDOS onto a newish physical replacement.

    I was than able to convert the vdi to vhd using VBoxManage clonehd source.vdi target.vhd --format vhd

    VHD files can be mounted windows and the contents can then be copied across.

    Not had access to prove the above has actually worked in my case yet though. Might give some pointers though.

    Superuser.com thread

    Thanks to chizh

    gandalf72 (18th July 2016)  


  6. #6
    DF VIP Member Over Carl's Avatar
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    Default Re: taking an image of a server and virtual hard disks and putting onto a different p

    Acronis True Image is great for taking images and restoring to another drive (but doesn't touch physical to virtual migration).

    If you are planning on imaging a drive then restoring it to a different computer (to run natively, not as a vm), then use True Image with Universal Restore addon. If you use universal restore when restoring an image, it will strip the drivers out and you can insert the essential drivers at this stage (e.g. chipset / SATA) leaving you with a copy of windows that should boot in your target pc, but will probably need a lot of drivers to be reinstalled.

    2 Thanks given to Over Carl

    gandalf72 (18th July 2016),  muttleymacclad (18th July 2016)  


  7. #7
    DF Moderator EvilBoB's Avatar
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    Default Re: taking an image of a server and virtual hard disks and putting onto a different p

    I give a +1 to Acronis. I remember when Ghost was an amazing piece of software until Symantec got their grubby mits on it. You used to be able to run it, image it and dump it on other hardware with minimal effort.
    DF Moderator
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    2 Thanks given to EvilBoB

    gandalf72 (18th July 2016),  Over Carl (18th July 2016)  


  8. #8
    DF VIP Member Over Carl's Avatar
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    Default Re: taking an image of a server and virtual hard disks and putting onto a different p

    Quote Originally Posted by Over Carl View Post
    Acronis True Image is great for taking images and restoring to another drive (but doesn't touch physical to virtual migration).
    Just remembered I manually did some p2v and back the other way using Acronis a few times. Wasn't very hard, just created a rescue cd iso, mounted that as the DVD drive for the VM, edited VM BIOS boot order to boot from DVD, then created/restored images in the VM.

    Thanks to Over Carl

    gandalf72 (18th July 2016)  


  9. #9
    DF VIP Member gandalf72's Avatar
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    Default Re: taking an image of a server and virtual hard disks and putting onto a different p

    Quick update, I have managed to get someone to give me the serial key and iso of server 2012 now. So the situation will be once they actually give that to me will be to find where the actual hyper-v virtual machines are located and somehow transfer them and then apply to my server 2012 r2. On the PC that I want to clone / get the image off there, is a dc and 4 virtual machines and that is the real treasure that I want to try and acquire. Those virtual machines don't have licence's though, on them just evals and would need to keep installing them every so often which is not a biggy in the grand scheme of thing. I know they use Hyper-V as the main way to open it.

    Is that any easier to achieve? I was going to take in a portable hard drive and see if I could just copy and paste or is that just too simple and it does not work like that.



    In terms of cloning the hard drive - my hard drive will be a different size from the original and also different processor original intel mine AMD - would there be any impact there?

    Will Acronis true image normal work on a server, I am seeing they have a server version but we are into stupid money for what I am trying to achieve although I am sure it is an amazing product.

    Big thanks to everyone out there who is helping as I am not used to these things and just trying to get my head round it. It is very much appreciated.

  10. #10
    DF VIP Member hoponbaby's Avatar
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    Default Re: taking an image of a server and virtual hard disks and putting onto a different p

    You should be able to just copy off the vhd files then create new hyper-v's on the new server pointing them to the old files. If they are members of the domain though will you be able to log in to them?

    As for the licencing could always use SLIC activation - there are modified versions of the vmwp file around.

    Thanks to hoponbaby

    gandalf72 (20th July 2016)  


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