Best way to clone a drive while it is running?

[Hack&Lube]

I have an institutional work/school computer right now and I need to make a perfect clone of the drive contents so I can keep working on it home as they are going to wipe and re-image them in a few days.

I do not have access to the actual hardware (ie: can't open the case and remove the drive). What is the best way for me to clone the drive and get a workable image that will boot at home? I don't need a perfect sector by sector clone, just an image that will work. The problem is that this system is running Server 2008 R2 and a lot of the software I normally use won't work on it.

I cannot use VMware to make a virtualization of the whole system because the point is that I want to work on the Hyper-V virtualzations that are already on it and you can't run a virtualization inside a virtualization AFAIK.

[J Diddy]

If you can't use virtualization won't you need the exact hardware at home to run the image?

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by J Diddy

If you can't use virtualization won't you need the exact hardware at home to run the image?

I'm not sure. I've never used Hyper-V before, therefore the confusion. With VMWare and Virtualbox I usually just export the VMs and run them on any machine.

[sclitheroe]

Free trial of this might work, it's not crippled in trial mode:
http://www.symantec.com/business/sys...server-edition

But Win2K8R2 is gonna barf on activation regardless, not sure what you are going to do about that if you need it for longer than the no-activation period allows

But why wouldn't you just take the Hyper-V VM's, and convert them to VMWare Workstation using the free VMWare converter, if you already have VMWare?

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

I'm not sure. I've never used Hyper-V before, therefore the confusion. With VMWare and Virtualbox I usually just export the VMs and run them on any machine.

what he's saying is that if you take an image of that Server 2008 box and try to put it on a different machine, it won't work due to the driver issues. when you swap out the motherboard and chipset of any PC (which is essentially what would happen in your case) Windows won't even boot. if you take a raw image of that machine and put it on your box at home, you'll likely just end up staring at a blue screen

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda

what he's saying is that if you take an image of that Server 2008 box and try to put it on a different machine, it won't work due to the driver issues. when you swap out the motherboard and chipset of any PC (which is essentially what would happen in your case) Windows won't even boot. if you take a raw image of that machine and put it on your box at home, you'll likely just end up staring at a blue screen

That actually doesn't happen much anymore. I've moved installations from entirely different chipsets and CPUs to entirely different machines without issue because the driver stores in current OSes are so comprehensive, you will rarely ever encounter a situation where you cannot boot and then run Windows Update to fix everything up. Even if that is the case, you can install drivers manually or manually add drivers to the driver store.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Free trial of this might work, it's not crippled in trial mode:
http://www.symantec.com/business/sys...server-edition

But Win2K8R2 is gonna barf on activation regardless, not sure what you are going to do about that if you need it for longer than the no-activation period allows

But why wouldn't you just take the Hyper-V VM's, and convert them to VMWare Workstation using the free VMWare converter, if you already have VMWare?

No, I won't need it for after the no-activation period. I have all the machines copied and will try converting later. Just trying to cover my bases before the machines get wiped in a day or two by getting as many different backups as I can.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

That actually doesn't happen much anymore. I've moved installations from entirely different chipsets and CPUs to entirely different machines without issue because the driver stores in current OSes are so comprehensive, you will rarely ever encounter a situation where you cannot boot and then run Windows Update to fix everything up. Even if that is the case, you can install drivers manually or manually add drivers to the driver store.

Yeah, but desktops mostly boot from IDE or SATA, which is a great common denominator. Not sure a clone of 2008R2 booting from a RAID card is gonna map to home SATA hardware quite as cleanly. Probably a straight clone and then using the repair tools on a 2008 boot CD would be enough to get you to the point you've described though.

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

I cannot use VMware to make a virtualization of the whole system because the point is that I want to work on the Hyper-V virtualzations that are already on it and you can't run a virtualization inside a virtualization AFAIK.

In this case, no, as Hyper-V (and Windows XP Mode for W7) is hypervisor aware.

However, you can actually use VMware Workstation to run ESXi in a VM and then run VMs off that. It's the strangest thing, but it works.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda

what he's saying is that if you take an image of that Server 2008 box and try to put it on a different machine, it won't work due to the driver issues. when you swap out the motherboard and chipset of any PC (which is essentially what would happen in your case) Windows won't even boot. if you take a raw image of that machine and put it on your box at home, you'll likely just end up staring at a blue screen

There might be problems moving from server class hardware to a normal desktop, but worst case you can probably just rebuild the HAL with windows repair disc.

edit: I guess scitheroe beat me to it.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

In this case, no, as Hyper-V (and Windows XP Mode for W7) is hypervisor aware.

However, you can actually use VMware Workstation to run ESXi in a VM and then run VMs off that. It's the strangest thing, but it works.

Yeah, I didn't know that you couldn't share the hypervisor so it perplexed me for a bit, I thought VT-x support was off in the BIOS or something.