virtualbox.org

I have a strange situation. You see, a few months ago I foolishly made a complete pc restore image. This has some files that I need. I can't simply access it, it needs to be restored onto something. I have no spare hard drives large enough, only my main HDD is big enough to restore it to. However, I don't wish to tamper with my existing windows installation. Partitioning might work, but the complete PC restore likes to completely reformat any drive it's installed to.

I've heard that running a VM will completely hide your actual OS, so that any program run from within the VM will not detect your real operating system at all. Is this true, and will running the complete pc restore in VirtualBox work?

Yes, it's true.

If the VM would actually boot the restore image? I don't think so. First there are the hardware changes that could make it impossible. Second, the MBR is likely not to be in the image, or restored properly.

What you can do though, is restore it to a VM, create a second hard drive and install something else on it (make the restored VM the secondary/slave drive in the VM). You can use Linux, but if you happen to have a Vista install dvd (or someone near you has it and you may borrow it), you can install that without a serial key so you have a 30 day 'trial'. You can then fetch the files you need from the secondary drive.