You may or may not know "drive snapshot" (www.drivesnapshot.de) - it's a disk imaging tool I've been using to do P2V conversions together with Vmware importer.
Also, I'm doing in-guest backups with drive snapshot as well.
If I had to do "bare metal restores" - formerly I made new VM, created disks and did the restore using BartPE, to boot the VM and restore the backup to the virtual disk.
Now it seems that Drive Snapshot recognizes partitions mounted with the vmware diskmount - this means it's possible to do a restore that is done inside a guest (or even a physical machine) and restore it to a VMDK if it is partitioned - without the use of a helper VM!
Have't done a full restore yet, but the process seems to work. Works the other way around also, but I fail to see if that is of importance (backup a vmdk to a .SNA snapshot) - unless you want to do some kind of V2P.
Finally, this trick is also handy if you want to change a drive snapshot backup - just restore it to a VMDK, change whatever you need, and backup to another .SNA file!
Message was edited by:
TonioRoffo
Message was edited by:
TonioRoffo