Ghost Solution Suite

Hello all. We recently purchased Ghost Solution Suite for a specific reason: From time to time, we need to "cold clone" a physical computer, then boot that system up as a virtual computer in VMWare for further troubleshooting/investigation. Now, I understand I could use VMWare converter to clone a physical computer to a virtual machine, but that process requires a powered on and running Windows OS. In our situation we want to capture a computer's state without booting into the OS. Hence the term "cold clone".

So, I know that I can capture a "cold" image of a physical computer as a VMDK or GHO file using Ghost32. I have done this successfully. The problem starts when I create a VM using the captured VMDK as the base disk. The new VM will not boot correctly because of the hard drive controller driver in the image is for the old physical machine, and does not support the required VMWare hard drive controller.

VMWare Converter has the ability to import VMs from a backup image or a 3rd-party virtual machine, but this mode does not support VMDK or GHO images.

So, what I'm asking is: Does anybody out there know of a straghtforward process to achieve what I described above? Without booting the VM with recovery CD's and injecting hard drive controller drivers? Does Symantec provide a utility or some other way of doing this?

Thanks in advance for any responses!

I had a similar problem when trying to clone a physical XP machine into a VMware machine, and found that VMWare converter also gave me a VMDK that would not boot due to a mismatched hard disk controller.

I went the route of trying to find solutions on the VMWare forums and nothing came to light. Based on my experience, injecting drivers using a recovery CD is the only way if the operating system will not boot into safe mode when running as a VM.

I have not seen anything within the Ghost environment that can solve this issue on a cold image.

Thanks EdT. VMWare Tools or Converter must have a way of pre-injecting the correct drivers into a live OS before cloning, because I have successfully imported powered-on physical computers before. I was hoping the same process could be easily applied to cold images.

Has anywhere out there achieved a successful cold-clone-to-vmware using any other product or process? Acronis? etc?

You could use Deploy Anywhere to inject storage drivers(should be using WINPE ISO to run this).

Follow the steps mentioned below,

=>Create a WINPE standard ISO using Boot Wizard

=>Boot the VM using the ISO and quit Ghost32 when it launches

=>Navigate to X:\Ghost under command prompt

=>Run ngctw32 -console and VM shoul connect to Console (if there is valid IP under WINPE)

=>Create a new task with Deploy Anywhere selected and run it on the VM(by selecting the VM clinet listed under console with its MAC address)

=>If task reports drivers missing,add the storage drivers for the OS ,under the Deploy Anywhere tab on the task.

The article below is to run it locally without using Console (but console method is straight forward)

How to run Deploy Anywhere from the Ghost Boot CD
http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH110135

@Maneesh

Does Deploy Anywhere handle block device drivers when the O/S is booting from command to GUI mode? This is not handled by plug and play and is usually managed by Sysprep which is not a factor here.

@fitzgerac

>VMWare Tools or Converter must have a way of pre-injecting the correct drivers into a live OS before cloning, because I have successfully imported powered-on physical computers before. I was hoping the same process could be easily applied to cold images.

It could well be that the physical computers you imported previously happened to use an IDE controller, or already had drivers installed that VMWare could use, so there was no issue encountered when booting under VMWare.  Having looked closely at the Converter documentation when I was trying to get my XP machine into a VM, I could find nothing that would suggest the Converter has any driver injection capabilities.  For the record, I even tried installing VMWare tools on my XP machine before converting it, but even that did not solve the issue, and I had to run an OS repair to get it working in the end.  So if I've missed something, I too would love to know about any solution to getting the converter software to work properly.