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In this tutorial I am going through basic steps of creating the virtual machine, which should be straight forward process and than use the iso file I already created to have a bootable media for Acronis True Image Echo Server. The iso is 50mb and portable for use in VMWare Workstation and Virtual Daemon tools. Before we can restore the reference image I installed Windows XP Sp2 with all default settings, updated the image with security updates and installed SVS 2.1 personal client.

After the image (.tib extension) was created I manually edited the file to add newsid.exe and RunOnce registery entry. Pretty cool feature and very simple to use.

This feature is also offered by VMWare, but for me the integration of Acronis True Image Echo Server and the Windows Explorer shell is amazing. Right click the file, choose the mode (r or rw) and mount the image on a drive letter.

Create new Virtual Machine wizard in VMWare Workstation

Mount the Acronis True Image Echo Server CD-ROM boot iso.

Click Recovery

Click Next and locate your share by using Network or just enter the unc path to the tib backup.

Login and select the file. Click next

Select your Backup date and click next. I am using a edited backup set from a original image. Offline I edit the C partition and connected the register hive to add a dword entry in RunOnce. What I did is to add newsid.exe to c:\windows and created a new regisery entry to start newsid.exe one the user was logged on the reset the computer sid.

Click Next

Click Next

Select Disk1 and click Next

Select the 64GB VMWare disk we created before and click Next

Click Next and Next

Click Proceed to restore the file backup of the image.

After 10 minutes the image was restored. Click OK and Exit

Login with Administrator account and newsid.exe started. Provide the virtual guest with a computer name and reboot.

To me this tool is one of the best for having complete virtual/physical OS backups. You can create different initial backups and afterwards create a differential set and than convert this image to any of your favorite virtualization platform like VirtualPC, VMWare Workstation, VMWare ESX and Parallels.

In this tutorial I used the Acronis True Echo Server image to build my new virtual guest based on Windows XP. The tool has many neat features which I will go though in my other tutorials.