Desperate: Restoring Virtual PC volumes?

[tharpold]

Sorry to repeat much of a prior post, but I've had no reply to the original posting of about a week ago (several views, but no one has offered advice), and I've had no luck in Microsoft's VPC fora. There the only advice is (Windows boilerplate -- doesn't anyone get tired of this?) "you'll need to reinstall all your OS and apps from CD, run all the Windows updates to bring them up to currency, and then *maybe* you can reinstall your documents from the backups." In other words: your Retrospect backups are probably worthless. I'm hoping that someone else here can offer other, more, ah, constructive advice...

 

Here's the text of the earlier post:

 

(Virtual PC 6.1.1, Retrospect 6.0.204, Mac OS X 10.3.8)

 

A catastrophic experience with a Windows utility for zeroing unused disk space resulted in the corruption of my Virtual PC volumes for Windows 95, 98, and XP. I was forced to delete these volumes, on the assumption that my regular backups of those disk images with Retrospect would make it easy to restore their contents. (I was backing up the disk images by mounting them to the Desktop and backing up with dedicated scripts for each image. The backups are current.)

 

I had hoped that the restore process would be as simple as: recreating a disk image configured for each version of Windows, restoring to each image from the backups via Retrospect, and then creating a Virtual PC configured to use that image. But I've not been able to get VPC to boot a Windows "virtual" OS from the restored image: in each case, Windows seems to be treating the disk image as a volume without a properly-installed OS, as it asks me to install one (short error message displayed over a black screen).

 

Has anyone here experience in how this restore should be performed? Of course, I *really* need the data on these disk images, and I don't want to go through the trouble of installing a fresh OS from CD onto each one unless I absolutely have to...

 

TH

[twickland]

Are you aware that VPC drive images are packages? Packages will show up as folders in Retrospect when you try to restore them.

 

It will be easiest to restore using a snapshot. Double-click on the folder(s) with the desired drive names to mark it (them) for restore.

 

After restoring, double-click on a restored drive image in Finder. This should launch VPC, and you should be on your way.

[CallMeDave]

While Virtual PC 7 does create packages, TH makes clear that he is using not backing up the virtual disk image, but is instead mounting the "PC Disk" volume and backing that up as a Source volume.

 

I suppose backing up the mounted volume would allow for incremental backups of the files inside, instead of backing up the single disk image that would be re-copied each Session. But since there's no mention on the Dantz pages of this being known to work, it would have been wise to have tested a Restore before assuming that it would.

 

Assuming that Windows files could be copied to a Macintosh based Backup Set and then copied back to an empty image file seems like a dangerous preconception.

 

Dave