Today I was helping a colleage to restore an image that was created with TrueImage to an empty VHD. The process can be narrowed down to the following steps:
- Create the image using TrueImage
- Create two VHDs on the target VM (one to store the image, and the other to restote the image to)
- Mount the VHD that will hold the TrueImage image using vhdmount and format it
- Copy the Image from step 1 onto the VHD
- Unmmount the image and commit changes
- Boot into drive image and restore the image
Sounds easy? Well, usually it is - but today I faced a problem with step 3 above. When I mounted the VHD and formatted it, everything seemed fine, but when TrueImage tried to read the VHDs, it barfed and said that it was "unsupported". This was very weird since I mounted the VHDs time and time again without problems and the contents were inside. The VHDs were formatted as NTFS, so there really was no reason for the "unsupported" file format.
We tested and decided to format the partitions from within TrueImage using the new hardware wizard. After formatting them, I mounted the one that would hold the TrueImage image, copied the file and then tried to restore the image once again.
To my surprise, this time around TrueImage read both drives and the image contained on the VHD that I just copied. After that, it was just a matter of specifying the source and target and the P2V migration was underway.
Bottom line, if you are planning on using empty VHDs with TrueImage (the bootable CD), make sure that you format the VHD with the utility itself and not within Windows using vhdmount. Why? Dunno, but if someone would like to shed some light on this issue, please be my guest!