I’ve been wanting to image my HP MediaSmart server for sometime now since I’ve recovered it a few times now just messing around with it and once due to problems I had with the HP update service displaying xx/xx/xx. I figured I’d get a friend to make me the VGA cable so I could ghost the disk on the system locally. I’ve been lagging on getting a cable made and yesterday decided to just pull the drive out and slap it into my Vista computer and image it that way. After imaging a fresh install of the drive ((both boot and data partitions) I tried booting the disk in an Intel Core 2 Duo computer and it would stay in a constant reboot during the OS boot screen.
I then decided to try and re-image it back onto a VM running on my HP MediaSmart server. I created an XP Home default VM with 768 megs of RAM and an 80 gig drive. I used Nero to make my Ghost 2002 (I need to get 2003 to write to NTFS) boot disk, then I used nrg2iso to create an iso out of it to mount using VMware Server (free version). I also created a blank FAT32 VM Drive using a Windows XP VM. I copied my Ghost Images off my network onto the FAT32 VM disk that will be used to recover from. I added this FAT32 VM Drive to the HP MediaSmart VM that I will boot from using the Ghost ISO Image.
After booting up the new HP MediaSmart VM, I get to Ghost and do a Drive from Image and point to my ghost images on my FAT32 VM Drive. This is the worst part of the imaging, Ghost for some reason was writing increadibly slow, about 1 megs every 1-2 seconds so the Image took about 45-50 mins to complete.
After it was complete, I made a backup of the VM as I didn’t want to go through that again if it screwed up. I booted the VM and all was well except… once you login the system will want to activate your Windows again, but it will not use your original activation. If you choose not to activate, you will not be able to login.
Since this was going to be a test machine only, I decided to just Anti-WPA it to see if everything was going to work correctly. To do this, you must boot using safe mode (F8) with No network. I once again added another VM drive that had the Anti-WPA program on it, ran it, and let it register its dll. I then rebooted, logged it and everything was fine. You get a log in the event viewer saying Windows isn’t activated yet but that is it. I also had to turn off one of HP’s Health Monitoring services, which monitored the fans, heat etc. Once you do that the errors won’t report anymore and the console will show Good health. No Activation shield errors or anything.
I now had a perfectly working copy of my HP MediaSmart system in a VM! I plan on running most of my test applications on the VM and using the HP for my true file/backup server. This way if I screw something up I can just restore to a snap shot and continue on.
BTW, my HP MSS has the 2 gig RAM upgrade so I can easily run the other server virtualized.
June 26th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Whatz Expert, what entice you to post an article on ? This article was extremely interesting, especially since I was searching for thoughts on this subject last Thursday.
July 5th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Since this post I’ve downloaded VMware Converter, and it has the ability to convert a running PC into a VM. I’ve used it on many other PC’s without a problem, but I haven’t tried it on my HP MSS mainly because I just have too much data on it and don’t want to convert it all. Maybe next time I do a server refresh I’ll try it.