It’s time to clone and backup my drives

The only thing worse than a bad backup is no backup at all. Right now, I don’t have either. I talk a good game, but my system maintenance has been terrible. I haven’t been backing up the root drive on my main computer simply because it was too damn full. I have everything crammed onto one drive which means the backup would be a couple of gigs in size. Not only is that consuming way too much space, it’ll take too long to back it up and it will be impossible to restore. What’s the point of having a backup if it’s impossible to use? I’ve finally gotten to a place where I can make reasonable backups of my root drive. I trimmed and pruned everything off that drive so that only 100GB remains which includes the pagefile and the hibernation file. The final step is to move both of those to another drive. Even though I’ve had multiple drives […]

Converting A Physical Hard Drive To A Virtual Hard Disk

At first glance the project seemed easy – clone the physical hard drive inside a server and restore it into VirtualBox so as to use the virtual copy. Turns out, it doesn’t work the way I envisioned it in my head. All the latest software made promises of one-click cloning and on the fly conversion to VHD. But in the end, after three days of trying, I’m scrapping this project. I just can’t seem to get it to work. I tried using the latest software like O&O DiskImage 6, which listed VHD as one of the output formats. Well, it outputs to VHD alright, but that image doesn’t load. I cloned the drive without incident, but for the life of me I can’t that server to boot in a virtual environment. I created a VHD, I restored to a new VDI, I installed a new OS and tried the restore from there, I used a boot CD and restored from […]