Hi. I created an spf file of my c drive all the default options using the trial version of Shadowprotect Desktop and saved it to a folder on that same hard drive. When I try to open up this file in the latest version of VMWare 6 (by going to File...Open) I get the following error:

 

Failed to query source for information

 

 

Can someone please help with this? Thanks very much.  

I can reproduce this with encrypted monolithic and unencrypted split spf files. Looks like VMware Workstation does not understand the current SPF file format. If you can, why not open a case with VMware. You have to work around this by booting the SP recovery CD from within the VM and restoring through the VM network (plus HIR if that machine had SP on it).

Importing a .SPF image of a Windows Vista system is not supported in VMware Workstation 6.  Hopefully, StorageCraft can use its influence to “encourage” VMware to address this shortcoming.

 How about importing a .SPF image of a Windows XP Pro system into VMware 6? Is this supported? Thanks for your help.

William, page 102 in the VMware 6.0 Workstation User’s Manual implies that you can perform a file import operation on a ShadowProtect image of Windows XP system.  However, I have not tested this functionality myself.

 

In any event, you can simply restore the Windows XP image to the virtual machine and bypass the import operation altogether, if you wish.

I am trialing ShadowProtect Desktop v3.2 and the key feature I was interested in this product over the one I'm currently using and own is the VMWare Workstation support.  Sadly I can say it doesn't work on XP images either.  I just did a complete re-install with the XP Pro SP3 VA ISO cd image from MSDN Subscriber downloads and thus created a shadowprotect image of the clean install so I could go back to it.  Interestingly my VS 2005 is refusing to load past the splash screen so I thought I'd do a test in VMWare to see if it's the XP SP3 cd causing the issue, but I get the error "Failed to query source for information" in VMWare when trying to open the clean XP SP3 image I created.  I find this a bit suprising as right on the home page theres a video and a big spiel made about how easy this product is to use in VMWare Workstation.  Also being a trial version tester I don't have access to (that I"m aware of) the v3.2 bootable iso image to use to more easily get my image into VMWare.  If this can be made to work again I'll definitely be buying the program, but as it is now there's not enough reason to spend more money when I have a similar product already.

 

You need to download and use VMware converter (which is free) to convert the .SPF file to the proper type.

VMWare's Converter utility (which comes integrated into Workstation 6) is somewhat limited in the way it works.  The 'failed to query source for information' error occurs in two cases that I have seen.  1 - When trying to convert a Vista image (which is not yet supported by the converter), and 2 - when the image file being converted is not by itself in its own folder.  For some reason, the conversion will not work unless the ShadowProtect image has its own folder with no other files.  Also, if you are attempting to convert a chain with incrementals, first use the Backup Image Tool in ShadowProtect to collapse the chain into a single full backup (and put it in its own folder for conversion).

The converter seems to work well enough with the above criteria, but there is still always the solid option of using the ShadowProtect Recovery CD to restore to the VM in the normal (and much less buggy) way.