[arch-general] Restoring a Win guest when migrating from one VM to another - Was: pacman's "Depends On"

[Mauro Santos]

On 23-04-2015 19:31, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Apr 2015 18:18:49 +0100, Mauro Santos wrote:
>> You should give qemu+kvm+spice a try, I have found that it seems to
>> work acceptably even for usb redirection. Bonus points: no more
>> trouble after updates and it should work over the network.
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> I agree. The reason that I didn't drop Virtualbox and tested other
> hosts is, that I don't know how to get my Windows XP SP3 guest from
> 
> $ ls -hlG Virt*/winOS/*.vdi
> -rw------- 1 rocketmouse 28G Apr 20 23:31 VirtualBox VMs/winOS/winOS.vdi
> 
> to another host. It seems to be hard or perhaps impossible to restore a
> Win XP from a backup. I at least can't remember that it ever worked for
> me.
> 
> If possible I want to restore Win XP from a backup, when migrating to
> another VM. Any hints how to backup Win XP and restore it on another
> virtual machine are welcome.
> 
> Regards,
> Ralf
> 

You can make a copy of that image and try to run it directly with qemu,
it might just work, although it might not be optimal in terms of speed.
What can be quite tricky is the change in emulated hardware, Windows
does not like that and will most probably throw a fit.

Changing the image format is not hard, run qemu with 2 virtual disks,
one the vdi another a raw image and use a live cd to dd/cp from one disk
to the other, or use any tool that does the conversion. However I would
say do a clean install if you can and use virtio devices from the start.


-- 
Mauro Santos