How to boot and install a .tib image ?

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Natacha
Posts: 7
Joined: 3. Mar 2009, 13:51

How to boot and install a .tib image ?

Post by Natacha »

Hello,

I created a VB where I put available the optic reader, and USB.

My .tib image is 22 giga, on an external USB HDD. I also copied the image on the slave part of the HDD. (D:) on the host machine

If I can install it, this image will be the OS and pre-installed programs.


What I did, but did not work :roll:

So I booted the VB with the Acronis True Image boot CD to restore the .tib image.

So, when I am in the boot section, to restore my image, the Virtual PC does not see my USB external HDD. It does not see either my (D:), where there is also an image. (In the parameters, before booting, I turned on USB fonction, CD rom, sound, etc.). And 22 giga is too big to burn on DVD.

Is there a way that my USB external HDD can be read to install the .tib image.

Or is there a way to read the original (D:) of the host OS, to install the .tib copy.

What can I do to install this .tib image.

Sorry for my bad english, I am french.

Thank you very much for your precious help ! 8)

Natacha, Montréal, Québec
vbox4me2
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Re: How to boot and install a .tib image ?

Post by vbox4me2 »

The issue you have is with the Acronis boot CD, when booting it becomes the OS inside your VM.
I don't use Acronis so you have to discover this yourself, see if you can "map a drive" to the Host D: drive via the network (D: must be set shareble).
Or, create another disk for the VM(slave) large enough for this 22g file, boot the VM and copy your USB file to this second VM drive, booting Acronis will then see this VM slave for you to use.
vmuser
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Joined: 7. Mar 2009, 00:39

Re: How to boot and install a .tib image ?

Post by vmuser »

I have just tried out the following that may be of some help:

I have a copy of the Acronis boot CD which I converted to an ISO file. This file resides on my system harddrive. I have insered this as a CD ROM so that when the VM boots it does so into the Acronis recovery environment. I have a TIB file on my external USB hard drive - so I plug that in and let the host PC discover and mount it so that I can see all the drives in My Computer.

Now before starting the VM up I go into the USB secion of settings for the VM, and make sure "Enable USB controller" is ticked together with "Enable USB 2.0 (EHCI) Conroller" I now add a new USB filter - Virtual box then displays the name of my USB harddrive (A Western Digital) and then make sure the entry under USB Device filters for my newly added drive is also ticked. This effectively connects the external USB hard drive to the VM.

I Start up the VM and on my machine Acronis boots up. Now I click on the Recovery option and Acronis starts to analyse the partitions on the drives and then promptly finds the partitions on the USB together with those on the VDI file. This then allows me to restore a TIB image to the VM hard drive. Powering down the machine and removing the Acronis ISO from the CD drive then rebooting restores the TIB file to its former glory.

I should point out that it did take a VERY long time and that was for a TIB file that was about 6GB in size - but your mileage may vary depending on the speed of your system (mine was a T2050 core duo + 2GB RAM laptop) it was noticibly quicker on my Q8200 system. Hope this helps.
mlfairc5r
Posts: 6
Joined: 14. Jan 2009, 04:00

Re: How to boot and install a .tib image ?

Post by mlfairc5r »

Hi,

I basically did exactly the same thing as the last poster - created a new VM, but kept the Acronis boot CD in the CD drive, and booted from it. Then I restored from the .tib file on a USB drive into a partition on the VM hard drive (Acronis created the partition as part of the restore). So far so good.

When I try to boot the VM, it gets to the first Windows splash screen, and then fails with a blue screen of death.

I read somewhere that installing a .tib image created from a physical machine can cause some problems, and the recommendation was to boot in safe mode and delete device drivers, reboot and let the generic drivers be applied.

I can hit F8 and get the boot choices menu. However, even booting to safe mode results in a BSOD.

I then mounted this drive on another VM, because one of the messages on the BSOD recommended running fsck on the file system. I haven't done that yet, but have verified that I can browse it and everything seems to be there.

Could this be a problem with the Master Boot Record, which is from the original hardware? I would assume that I wouldn't get as far as I am if that were the case, but perhaps not.

My purpose for doing this is to have a virtual backup of my laptop to serve as a stop-gap in the event of a hardware failure.

I'm running VBox 2.2.2 on Ubuntu 9.0.4 (Jaunty) 64bit. I also experienced the long time to load the image, and found that there is an open defect regarding USB 2.0 performance in VBox. The guest is Windows XP Pro 32bit.



Thanks,


Mike
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Re: How to boot and install a .tib image ?

Post by Sasquatch »

A BSOD always comes with an error code, and sometimes a module/file it crashes on. It would be useful if you capture that and search on that error code.
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mlfairc5r
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Joined: 14. Jan 2009, 04:00

Re: How to boot and install a .tib image ?

Post by mlfairc5r »

Thank you. I didn't realize the hex codes that come out are actually useful. I learned something here.

What it is essentially saying is that there is a driver problem associated with the disk drive preventing boot up, and it's possibly due to the size mismatch, since I didn't make the partition the same size when I loaded the image from Acronis (possibly a mistake) as the partition on the original machine. Unfortunately, the only viable instructions I have found to get past this are to edit the registry on a working machine before making the image. I don't want to risk my work machine, so I'm not sure I'll try it, but if I get a lot of time, I might (I'll have to create a backup image, edit the registry, and if it causes any issues, restore the image).

If others are finding ways to make an image from an actual machine work, I'm sure many are interested in hearing it. It's probably not a high-priority use case for VMs, but I think it would be very useful.


Mike
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