Can i test the recovery CD and images in a VM, How? (B&R)

Im coming to you straight from Windows 7 HELL. I just spent 2 days trying to back up my system by making an image of my whole drive for restore, like norton ghost used to do. I had to re-install win 7 64 bit so i did then set it up as I like with my extra apps and settings and updated drivers. This took me two days. Now time for ghosting/imaging the disk.

I mostly use Macrium Reflect because the free version has served me well over the years but suddenly, now, it will not write data on all backup DVD, and they offer no support. I have tried Acronis True Image home 2011, EaseUS ToDO Backup, and wasted 15 disks between restore dvd's and image backups because none of them would either finish making the dvd image backups or they would have errors on them.. of all 4 programs I have tried, Paragon Backup & Recovery™ 2011 (Advanced) Free is the only one that completed the image to dvd operation without errors ! I got my fingers crossed!

But now you see I'm paranoid about using this app without making absolutely sure it will restore my drive + partitions + windows with no problems.. i need to test it in a VM first to be sure the backups work right.

I use Virtual Box for a VM and am pretty familiar with using it, only I dont know how to make the VM see my real CD/DVD drive to load the images from.. I have already loaded the rescue disk in the VM and can get it to load.

Does anyone know how to do this? I want to the virtual copy of the recovery CD to install all the images and create me a whole virtual copy of my windows 7 just like i would on my hard drive.

Thanks..

John Phoenix ( with little hair left)

 

If you have a spare HD you can do a real test without any complications.

I don't know about Paragon but with Acronis once you get past 2 or 3 DVDs the joke is you'll wear the DVD tray out before the restore is done because it doesn't do all of one DVD then the next etc. Maybe Paragon is different.

You may have your reasons for DVDs but IMO given the size of images these days an external USB drive or other HD mechanism such as a caddy is better. Just my thought.

 

This is a laptop so I cannot connect a spare drive to it. I don't have a USB large enough for a backup. This backup almost filled 3, 4.7 gig dvd's. I do love dvd's for backup cus they are relatively cheap and i'm on a tight budget. This laptop is only a year old and the backup media I used for the initial restore is in good shape but i only use that as a master, and like to make ghosted copies after removing bloatware and installing updates to restore from. I have no idea why my otherwise very trusted macrium reflect suddenly would not write to all backup disks. Never had that happen before, and tried twice. Out of 2 tries and 3 disks each time one was missing data on disk # 1 and the other would not write to disk # 2 - yet all other disks were written to. With the other programs I tried Acronis and EaseUS, both of them had entirely different errors, so there is nothing common I can point to causing me problems. I'm just hoping the Paragon solves my problem.

Nope.. my best option for piece of mind i believe is to test the images in a VM.

 

I give up.

I found an 80 gig HD to try to install it on from my wifes computer. this had a good working copy of win xp that wasn't needed. I get a message saying sector size is not supported and it goes no further. Time to scrap these 4 dvds, 3 backup and 1 restore.

That makes 19 dvd's thats ruined for me. The computer gods must hate me. Time to try the next backup app.

 

You may have to completlly clean the 80GB test HD, you can do it in the windows commend prompt and using diskpart, this will remove the first physical sector 63 that Windows XP partition this drive.

If you made the paragon backup with B&R 2011 in the Vista partition mode, the first physical sector will be in sector 2048, try cleaning the 80 GB test HD by using the diskpart commend and doing a clean after you select the correct drive.

Let us know if this works for you.

 

Is it possible the disk the image was created from had the new 4K sectors instead of the usual 512 byte sectors? If so it would be impossible to restore sector contents. Don't throw out the DVDs yet.

 

Thanks folks.. i'll look into those things.. I didnt have it set to vista mode that i know of.

I'll look into cleaning the drive, but i did get further in a VM, I was able to use my host dvd to try to load the image, but I got the same error "sector size specified is not supported".

I was trying to use a linux virtual mode for the recovery cd.. perhaps I should have used win 7 64 bit? ( I didnt think the recovery disk would run in a VM that way so i didn't try it)