Hi all.

Hopefully you can help me. I need to convert several ghost images of older PCs into some format that can be run in either Microsoft Virtual Machine 2004 or VMware. I know that you can link virtual machine and VMware to iso CD images. That would be ideal. If there is some way to convert them into actual virtual machines, then even better.

I've already tried using WinImage. It's great at creating virtual images of existing PCs, but I have images I need to convert. Any ideas? All help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Ashley

I don't knowif that is possible.

But there exists a small program from Symantec (Ghost explorer) that you can see and extract an image made from ghost..


I hope that I'm not wrong and that I have helped you..

Well VMware Esx uses a product called P2V (physical to Virtual). As far as the microsoft work around it's kinda annoying, but it can be done.

You use ghost to capture the snapshot of the drive to your *.gho file. Used ghost to create a bootable diskette. Get a full copy of WinISO and create a bootable CD using the ghost bootable diskette you've made. Or go to bootdisk.com and copy ghost into the disk.

Next copy the *.gho file into the Bootable cd iso you made with WinISO. Make sure that ghost is on there. Now Mount the iso as your "CD" in the virtual machine and boot. Ghost the VM disk as you normally would on the VM.

Cheers!

A gho file is a hard disk image (like a compressed hard drive w/reg entries), how are you meant to convert it to a windows setup image?


This post has been edited by T D: Jun 26 2006, 10:15 AM

There's a simple work around. Restore the image within vmware with somethin like Live state recovery desktop which can restore a ghost image to different hardware or virtual machine.

Exactly.

Or if the system you want to ghost is another box. You can ghostcast the server over the network.

if you used sysprep on the images before you captured them and added the hdd drivers using sysprep then you can just create a large enough virtual disk and drop your image into the vm.

You also need to ave compatiable HAL's though that is not as critical to the VM as it is to a real system.


You can also do this in reverse, capture your vm with ghost and deply it to a rela machine. just be sure to have the ide controllers and a compatible HAL installed.

I'm just sayin' there's no way to put a gho to a windows source with I386, win51 etc.

There's a plugin specifically created to import ghosted images into a virtual machine. Please see this thread:

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=76734

If I understand right the Ghost explorer can extract the GHO images?

I have quite a fier partition images from my old PC, but cannot access the files!



linuxito