Testing full disk backups of Windows Vista

I am thinking of completely reformatting my laptop at some point, and having a working copy of my previous Vista installation would be a great boon to my efforts.

Unfortunately, there are two problems in my way:

1. I do not have another computer to toss Vista on to. I do have an external with enough storage space to do a full backup, but not an actual computer to install it to. I imagine virtualization could solve this problem.

2. I am using an OEM version of Vista, which means that Microsoft will complain loudly if I try to take a full disc image and throw it up on another machine/virtual box.

I have absolutely no intention of buying another copy of Vista just so I can test my backups (also, it's not legal to run Home Premium, the version I have, in a virtual machine), and I would rather not go the illegal route.

I suppose as a worst-case scenario, access to every file on my system would suffice, which would be essentially a full disk image, virtualize that, and then run off live-boot. Does anyone else, however, have any other suggestions/setups to this respect?

 

Just use software that integrity checks your disk image after it makes it like Acronis TrueImage... there is no reason the image won't work, cloning is a pretty perfect process.

I clone dozens of computers a week... No issues yet.

 

So, there are two reasons why I am suspicious of a full-disk clone:

1. My partition table is messed up (i.e. Gparted doesn't recognize it, there are overlapping sectors, etc etc)

2. I have HPA

So I really don't want to have to make a leap of faith. It would be nice to know, though, if 1 and 2 will cause problems

Edit: Oh, anyone know of free clone image verification tools?

 

What software are you using for the disk clone?
Did you clone to a disk, or did you make an image? Gparted will not likely correctly recognize a compressed disk image.
What is HPA?

If you're really worried, clone the drive, take a hash of the finished clone, delete the image, clone AGAIN, take a hash of that. If the hashes don't match up, then the clones weren't identical (though to be honest I'm not sure if they will be 100% identical... but logic tells me they would be)


In the end what you're looking to do is deploy the image to test it, correct? Well then, the only way to be sure would be to ACTUALLY deploy it. Get another hard drive and deploy to that.

 

So, I am planning on using Clonezilla for my clone. I have used it with some success on the Ubuntu partition on my hard drive. When testing I made an image to a mounted NTFS external hard drive.

The problem with GParted has nothing to do with cloning (except my distrust of it); GParted reports my current partition table as completely unallocated. Fun, huh!

Cloning twice would be a possibility for checking the integrity of the clone. However, it doesn't give me any info on whether or not restoring the clone will work.

I'm sorry about seeming so anal about this, but if I need to restore my laptop with a cloned image, I would much rather have a pleasant surprise that it worked, rather than a loss of all my data when it doesn't.

 

Okay, so let me make sure - you're planning on reformatting, then cloning so you can push that clone back whenever you need it? Well, just push it back... if you just reformatted, it's not like you've got much to lose, right!?

Though again, the way to be 100% sure without risk would be to just push the image back to another drive. And again, are you making an image or are you just doing a full disk clone? But what I've gathered is that you don't want to do anything illegal, or spend any money, or have an trust in a pretty full-proof process.

 

Sorry, I wasn't clear; I want to take a snapshot of my current system state, reformat and repartition, and stick with the new system. If it so turns out that things go south, use the snapshot to restore my laptop to previous condition. So the clone acts as both a safety net as well as a backup.

I will do normal, file-copying backups as well; doing a full image lets make sure I don't lose anything because I forgot to copy it.

So, in my mind the steps are:

1. Do "normal" backups, copying files from my home directory to the external
2. Do a clone backup, as in clone to an image. I don't think I can do a hard drive to hard drive clone without having a clean hard drive lying around. I really need to invest in a RAID array for backups or something.
3. Attempt to load the clone into a virtual machine, and test if its files are accessible from my Ubuntu partition (which I can get to run in VirtualBox)
4. Wipe my laptop, repartition, reinstall
5. Restore files
6. Whenever necessary, boot up the virtual machine and retrieve anything I missed
7. If utterly, direly necessary, used cloned image to reset laptop to beginning state. Assuming the image works.

I suppose this is an unfair question; I've already got an idea of what I want to do, and the response I've gotten to "test your backups" is "I don't test mine, besides checksumming/validating them." Is this fair?

 

Well, my issue is your distrust that the image will work. Can you boot the clone in a virtual machine like you are saying you want to do? If you can't do this now you won't be able to do it after you wipe the laptop either. But putting the image back onto the original hard drive will always work, and the software will verify that the image is a valid image before it tells you that it's done, and compares it to the hard drive. It does the testing for you.

 

Alright, so I'll explain the Virtualization issue a little more:

Ubuntu doesn't care about your hardware identity; it will happily boot and run inside a virtualization container. Windows, however, complains loudly.

In the worst case scenario, everything just fails to boot. Black screen. Nothingness.

With a lot of coaxing, I have managed to get Windows XP to boot to the Activation Screen (a convoluted process involving VMware). But of course, the "hardware" looks different to the OS, so it locks everything down, and I can't actually test anything.

I imagine the problems with Vista will be an order of magnitude greater; I've already heard stories about Vista being very fussy about its bootloader, etc. I spent two weeks trying to get XP to work, and failed. I don't think it will be possibly with Vista.

Restoring to the laptop, however, is a different matter; the hardware matches, and we don't have the virtualization layer to worry about. So I am optimistic that it would work, but troubled by a wonky partition table and HPA; if the image is low-level enough (I don't know enough about the technical details), it'll be identical, but if it gets fooled by the BIOS, there might be problems.

BTW, I never answered what HPA was: HPA is a feature in ATA drives that lets the computer "hide" storage space at the end of the drive. In the case of my Dell Vostro, when I press the Home button it activates the hidden space and swaps it into the main partition table.

 

I validate that my full disk backups are good at least quarterly.

I simply picked up another hard drive and swap it in for the restore.

This way my live, real, system is left intact and I have an identical system upon which to restore.

This describes the process in a bit more detail.

 

The problem with virtualization is that you are not creating a machine with the hardware as your computer, it's all standardized VMware hardware emulation. So using it in a virtual machine is just like putting the image on a totally different computer. Windows isn't locking things down, you're having drivers fail to load and cause the system to crash. When it does boot, it's looking for re-activation as it (rightfully so) sees it as a separate system.
I believe the newest version of acronis now offers an option to convert to a VMware image though, but I'm not sure how it works.

What you can do is use Acronis (sorry, it's what I know! I've used a few programs but Acronis is by far the best) to clone to a partition. Shrink the current partition on your external, then create another partition and clone to that (not an image, do disk to partition clone). Then you'll have EVERYTHING and you might even be able to boot that partition. Definitely would be able to with just a bit of tweaking.

 

I could never get Acronis to restore from my backup on an external drive. I went with Paragon Drive Backup, which works perfectly.

 

Ok, so a good point rose up in these posts: boot of my external hard drive. This actually would work quite nicely, if it works. I will try it out!

I believe I can do this without paid software, but if it ends up not being possible, I will definitely look into Acronis and Paragon. AKAJohnDoe, thank you for the link to that website; it was very instructive.

 

I believe that Paragon now has a free version as well.

 

Nyeh, I tried installing it but when I tried to get the free serial, the installer kept abruptly terminating. So much for Paragon!

I've repartitioned my external and will be performing a clone this afternoon! Wish me luck!

 

Good luck, Commander!

 

Status report!

Clonezilla copied the drive successfully, and booting from my main Windows I can see all the files. This is +1, and my baseline is fulfilled.

My initial attempt at booting from the external failed; the BIOS claimed no bootloader could be found. I have reconfigured the "main" bootloader to try to boot from H: drive; as long as Windows doesn't shut off USB devices while loading, things should work. Rebooting now!

 

It could be an issue with the boot.ini needing to be modified on the clone - if it's not on the same logical partition it won't be able to boot. Drive also needs to be flagged as bootable which can be done with GParted.

 

Ok, so I've done a bit of fiddling and am going to call it a night, but here's what I've found:

1. Vista ignores boot.ini, and instead uses what's called BCD. This is vexing, because while there's a great utility for editing BCD files on your current system, there is little to no information on editing it on another partition. Not even which file the info is stored in. So while I agree, boot information needs to be changed, its not boot.ini.

2. The next best thing, then, is to piggy back off of the C:\ drive's bootloader and make it try to load the bootloader on H:\ (my cloned partition). I ran into problems initially the "normal" way, which was having EasyBCD add another Windows entry to the list with H:\; apparently Windows bootloader doesn't like it, so I finally flat out changed my boot entry to H:\ (knowing full well that this would hose my regular boot sequence). And indeed, Windows immediately started complaining about a corrupt bootloader on H:\, and asked me to run repairs. Which of course, is only partially true: the bootloader is on the wrong hard drive, but they are bit for bit copies (I checked them with sha1sum)

3. After running repairs, I now have my normal boot sequence back, but a still corrupt boot sequence for the other drive.

Possible next steps include:

* Flagging the drive bootable with GParted, and then attempting to directly boot from it via BIOS (as Hep! suggested)

* Poking the Vista repair disk some more and seeing if I can get it to do more substantial repairs to the cloned image, to the point where it becomes bootable

* Look into some of the virtualization tips and hints for dealing with an OS's allergic response to alternate hardware. I remember there were a number of complex steps that you had to just have a chance; some may be applicable here.

* Throw in the towel and call this full disk image good enough.

 

Yeah, you're right about Vista. Sorry about the boot.ini thing. Though I am pretty sure there is a way to manually modify the Vista bootloader. I'll have a look.