Hyper-V Program Manager
I recently wanted to Ghost a physical computer to a virtual machine. This is usually best done with a TCP/IP boot disk that you can run in both locations, and by storing the Ghost image on a file server. Now, I have set this up in the past but I seemed to have misplaced my TCP/IP boot disk - and man are those things a pain to create.
Luckily a bit of looking around revealed this: http://www.netbootdisk.com/
This is a nice, free, tool that will take a plain DOS boot disk and turn it into a generic TCP/IP boot disk. It has a bunch of NIC drivers, and worked out of the box with booth my physical computer and my virtual machines. I just booted the floppy, set the username and password and seconds later was able to 'net use x: \\servername\share' from a DOS prompt with no problems.
Very nice indeed.
Cheers,Ben
Have you considered WinPE for this? I know it is only available to SA customers, but we have built our own WinPE disk with all the NIC and SCSI drivers we need for physical servers and a copy of Ghost32 which runs on WinPE. You get USB 2.0 support also which means that you can have a very rich platform to use for Ghosting. Because you create the WinPE image as an ISO, mounting is also a piece of cake in the virtual machine.
I also thought DOS was a thing of the past since the advent of winPE (or BartPE, which is pretty much the same thing). You get so much more - real driver support, USB, real NTFS support, you can load the dead machine's registry and change it (regedit -> Load hive -> point to c:\windows\system32\config\software or system).
BTW, I think Vista DVDs are also WinPE-based. I think if you hit shift-F10 during the initial boot, you get a command prompt.
If you absolutely must use DOS the use BARTPE's Boot Disks: http://www.nu2.nu/bootdisk/
Yes - as a Microsoftie I can easily get access to Windows PE - but sometimes I really need DOS. That and I have an older copy of Ghost (I beleive it was the last release to not include the WinPE version).
Cheers,
Ben
Wednesday, October 04, 2006 5:20 AM by Jonathan
> BTW, I think Vista DVDs are also WinPE-based.
> I think if you hit shift-F10 during the
> initial boot, you get a command prompt.
I've used shift-F10 during Vista installation to get a command prompt, but didn't know it was related to WinPE.
Then one time on a lark I tried shift-F10 during a Windows XP installation. It worked! I could start taskmgr.exe too, same as during a Vista installation.
There have still been a few times when I needed real MS-DOS too. Some notebooks could boot USB floppies but not USB CDs. They could boot the 4 floppies that Windows 2000 starts with or the 6 floppies that Windows XP starts with but then BSOD after the last floppy. So I had to boot MS-DOS, run fdisk and format, copy the contents of the CD to the hard drive, and then start the install from there.
When a notebook can't boot a USB CD it can't boot a Knoppix CD either. Yeah I think there's some way to start Knoppix from a floppy but I've never studied how. So my usual way of ghosting Windows installations doesn't work in that situation.
Why not use VMware Converter (now version 3.0 in beta)? :)
http://www.vmware.com/products/beta/converter/
You can have running machine all time, no any downtime!
I'm still hoping that MS is working on a real converter. The current scenario to convert a physical to virtual machine under Virtual Server is a nightmare. We have tried it about 15+ times and not once has it worked.