Hello,  I am attempting to execute a "Bare-Metal" restore in VMware Workstation 6.04.  The restore image is contained on an External Hard Drive.  I am able to open the the Storage Protect *.iso and start the Storage Protect program.  Sometimes the external drive is showing and other times it cannot be found.  One of the issues is that VMware is automatically naming the external drive "C:" which is not practical as I am trying to restore the backup image to the C: drive.  Can you help me with instructions in using either VMware or VirtualPC with a workable way to restore the image from physical to Virtual.  Thank you!

You really need to basically ignore the drive letters that you see in WinPE/BartPE.  They're only temporary drive letter assignments for that CD boot session.  To do a Bare Metal Recovery/Restore (BMR) to a VM guest machine, boot the ShadowProtect Recovery Environment CD within the VM guest machine and then use the Network Configuration tool's Disks tab to map a drive letter to a network share that contains the backup image file that you wish to restore to the VM guest's hard disk.  Then use the Restore Wizard and select that backup image file (out on that mapped drive) and choose the VM guest's hard disk as the target and make sure you check the Hardware Independent Restore (HIR) checkbox on the Restore Wizard's options page.  That's really all there is to it.  Oh, also in the restore wizard I suggest you check the boxes to restore the backed up disk signature, restore the backed up MBR, and set the partition active.

One limitation of HIR in ShadowProtect Desktop/Server editioin is that it will only work on a volume on which ShadowProtect Desktop/Server Edition is actually installed.  So, before you create the backup image which you intend to restore into the VM, make sure you have installed ShadowProtect, and THEN take a backup of the OS volume on which ShadowProtect is installed.  You can then restore that backup to a different machine using HIR.

 Hello,  I am able to map hard-disks, however I am trying to map an external USB drive and this is failing.  Is it not possible to map the external USB drives?

 In VMware the virtual disk is being shown as *:\ and no file system is being shown.  Must this be named the C drive in order for restore to take place?  Must the Drive be allocated and formated prior to restore taking place?  I have received a "Failure" indication when trying to restore from a mapped external drive on the network.

I do not understand the statement concerning the limitation of HIR.  Are you saying an additional copy of Shadowprotect be installed on the virtual machine?  Please clarify.  Thank you.

 Limitation of HIR - Are you saying that shadow protect will only HIR restore if the backup is stored on the particular hard-drive where the shadow protect program resides?  I am getting more and more confused.  I have shadowprotect installed on the C: drive.  The backup images were written to an external H: USB drive.  I am trying to restore the image on Physical H: USB drive to Virtual C: Drive using either Vmware Workstation or VirtualPC.  I have no idea why this continues to FAIL.

The issue is accessing the USB drive from within the VM.  Because the recovery environment is limited, you cannot use the standard USB import.  You need to share the folder that contains the backup image.  You then must use the Network Configuration Utility in the recovery environment to map the share you created to the USB drive on the host.  You can then chose the image file to restore.

You do not need to create and format the drive before you restore.  The restore wizard will help you do that after you have selected the backup image you wish to restore.

You do not need to have ShadowProtect installed on the host machine, you do have to have it installed on the system that you took the image of.

Hope this helps.

Scott
STC

 Scooter,  I have gone into "Network Configeration" and set up a share with both  physical Hard-Drive C: and D:.  The Storageprotect image is located on the D: drive.  When trying to restore I am given a failure message after selecting the *.spf image file through the restoration wizard.  I am using Windows XP Professional.

I am not able to set up mapping with the USB External drive.

What's the error message exactly?

 Scooter below find the failure report:

 Scooter, 

A 2nd image of the physical C: drive was made.  Again the restore process was tried.  Again the process failed after 6-minutes 1-second.
The errors included 500, 503,504, and 516 error codes.  An Image verify was tried inside of VMware with results being failure within 1-min 13-seconds.  In addition I tried opening the file to explore the image contents.  This too... failed.

It appears you are missing some of the files that make up your images.  If you have files with .sp1, .sp2, it is because your usb drive is formated as FAT and the largest file can only be 4GB.  Are you sure you have all of the files?

 Scooter,

A second image was prepared on the D-Drive that is formatted in NTFS.  This is the drive that was mapped and provided the below failure reports.  The USB Drive was taken out of the equation until I can get things working on the physical Hard drive.  I have all the files.  The trial was performed with a single 45-gig *.spf image.

Error Report:

 Scooter, 

I really think we should set up a remote-connect session so you may look at my PC.  I have the program to do this.  Please send me your E-mail address so we may schedule a time.  THE RESTORE IS NOT WORKING.

Please verify that your files are ok outside of the VM.  Are you able to verify and mount the image files.

If your files verify ok, you will need to check the event log on the host machine to find any network or disk failure errors.  We have only seen these types of errors when the file is corrupt or the host system throws I/O errors.