Can I Restore a Host Computer with a Guest OS Image?

[jdanniel]

Just out of curiosity...

If I use Windows XP as a Virtual Box guest operating system, install Acronis True Image on it, and make a backup of it to my external hard drive, can I use the Acronis True Image backup to do a disaster recovery full system restore on ANOTHER completely different computer?

Thank you.

Jd

[trekfan1]

No, it's not possible, Windows is hardware dependent, change of hardware cause blue screen at boot or if not, required a new activation!

[SecretCode]

In other words, yes it is possible in that virtualisation and disk imaging software enable it in principle ... but Windows is not designed to support this kind of thing. If you did a disk imaging move from one physical (non-virtualised) installation to other hardware you'd have the same issues that trekfan1 pointed out.

[vbox4me2]

Thats why MS created sysprep, but as with all migrations there are plenty of issues, use hardware profiles, or delete just about everything in device manager, deinstall specific hardware drivers such as video stuff and motherboard drivers, and then still it can lock up.

[mpack]

If I use Windows XP as a Virtual Box guest operating system, install Acronis True Image on it...

The answer is yes, it's very possible. Read this Wiki; although it discusses a move from physical to virtual, the issues it mentions are actually the same when moving an XP image between any sufficiently different hardware platforms. The fact that source or destination may be virtual doesn't really add anything to the list of problems.

In fact I did it very recently myself, i.e. I migrated Windows XP from an old to a new PC which has radically different hardware (but first I experimented with a move from physical to Vbox, just to find out what the problems were). It was surprisingly easy!

Following advice from that Wiki I ran MergeIDE on the old PC first to make that XP more tolerant of HDD controller changes (naturally I made an Acronis backup before doing this, just in case it failed, but in fact it worked fine and so I made a new Acronis backup of the result). Certain OS services on the old PC initially caused BSODs if they were allowed to run on the new hardware, so I installed "Windows Recovery Console" on the source PC (prior to making another Acronis image) so this would be available to run on the new PC, this let me to disable the unwanted services (in my case "agp440" and "processor") before attempting to boot XP on the target for the first time.

After that Windows XP booted up nicely on the new PC: it reverted to a VGA display of course, hence I lost my desktop layout, but XP prompted for drivers for all the new hardware it detected, and finally it prompted me to reactivate. I found that the entire process was actually much easier and faster than a normal XP install, even not counting that I didn't need to reinstall all my apps. My XP image is now running very happily in its new home.

[mpack]

Oh, one thing I left out. In my case the old PC had an IDE controller, the new PC was SATA. This will probably be the case for you as well. This hardware change is a problem because XP (SP2 anyway) doesn't include native SATA support (support comes from drivers supplied by the motherboard vendor). I chose to fix this by enabling "IDE emulation" in the BIOS of my new PC, then XP boots up fine without needing SATA drivers. The can probably be fixed at a later date - if you care.