Solved Another fail with Macrium V8 from INSIDE a VM

Hi folks
from INSIDE a VM I'm booting from the stand alone rescue media via an iso. I deliberately chose the PE version rather than the RE version as its better with "Virtual drivers" when restoring to another VM.

However it stays for a long time (around 5 mns on super fast SSD) in "Initialising Windows PE" and then Windows itself (the VM ) BSOD's . On Windows 11 insider preview latest build and vmware WKS 1.2.1



After 5 mins BSOD



Not a good day today with Macrium V8 -- V7 on Windows 10 works perfectly so I suspect something about W11 and Macrium V8 doesn't seem quite right yet !!!

(Back to DD again folks on W11 !!!!!)

Cheers
jimbo

I have no idea if I'm going down the right path here, but this is what I would try...

Build a Win 11 VM and install the VMware tools. Install Macrium Reflect in that VM. Build an ISO image recovery disc from within the VM. This should put all the VMware tools drivers on the recovery media.

Since the BSOD is complaining about a driver issue, I'm simply taking a stab hoping that might help.

jimbo45 said:

Hi folks
from INSIDE a VM I'm booting from the stand alone rescue media via an iso. I deliberately chose the PE version rather than the RE version as its better with "Virtual drivers" when restoring to another VM.

However it stays for a long time (around 5 mns on super fast SSD) in "Initialising Windows PE" and then Windows itself (the VM ) BSOD's . On Windows 11 insider preview latest build and vmware WKS 1.2.1

View attachment 17093

After 5 mins BSOD

View attachment 17094

Not a good day today with Macrium V8 -- V7 on Windows 10 works perfectly so I suspect something about W11 and Macrium V8 doesn't seem quite right yet !!!

(Back to DD again folks on W11 !!!!!)

Cheers
jimbo

Click to expand...

V8 works fine for me on Win11 PE, and Hyper-V, even on Dev version as well.

hsehestedt said:

I have no idea if I'm going down the right path here, but this is what I would try...

Build a Win 11 VM and install the VMware tools. Install Macrium Reflect in that VM. Build an ISO image recovery disc from within the VM. This should put all the VMware tools drivers on the recovery media.

Since the BSOD is complaining about a driver issue, I'm simply taking a stab hoping that might help.

Click to expand...

I would also try creating a boot menu option and see if that works ok.

cereberus said:

V8 works fine for me on Win11 PE, and Hyper-V, even on Dev version as well.

Click to expand...

Hi there
Re-installed Windows and it 's working perfectly again -- nothing wrong with the VM I had -- I re-installed from scratch W11 Dev from UUPDUMP.

Probably something in my Windows set up that had got hosed.

Macrium is a pretty good product so it was probably me with all that messing around on W11 with WSL etc.

Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

Hi there
Re-installed Windows and it 's working perfectly again -- nothing wrong with the VM I had -- I re-installed from scratch W11 Dev from UUPDUMP.

Probably something in my Windows set up that had got hosed.

Macrium is a pretty good product so it was probably me with all that messing around on W11 with WSL etc.

Cheers
jimbo

Click to expand...

Then marked as solved please.

cereberus said:

Then marked as solved please.

Click to expand...

Done

Cheers
jimbo

@cereberus I'm not the sharpest tack in the box when it comes to VMs as I don't use them often. This thread has made me realize I may have been doing it wrong all along so I need a lesson.

I have my default VM folder on an external hard drive partition. From within my host OS or using a Macrium rescue usb, I back up this partition regularly with Macrium along with the second partition on the external drive where I store personal files and folders. I have never backed up a VM from within the VM itself. I don't even have Macrium installed on my VM. The few times I've had to recover a VM all I did was restore the partition where my VMs resided. It's always worked.

What is the advantage of backing up a VM from within the VM or the disadvantage of doing it my way.

glasskuter said:

@cereberus I'm not the sharpest tack in the box when it comes to VMs as I don't use them often. This thread has made me realize I may have been doing it wrong all along so I need a lesson.

I have my default VM folder on an external hard drive partition. From within my host OS or using a Macrium rescue usb, I back up this partition regularly with Macrium along with the second partition on the external drive where I store personal files and folders. I have never backed up a VM from within the VM itself. I don't even have Macrium installed on my VM. The few times I've had to recover a VM all I did was restore the partition where my VMs resided. It's always worked.

What is the advantage of backing up a VM from within the VM or the disadvantage of doing it my way.

Click to expand...

None really. I just copy the vhd using file explorer.

One use of Reflect that is great is the ability to open up a Reflect image as a virtual machine (using Viboot) which is a great way of testing the images have been properly backed up. You can do this with HyperV or Virtualbox but not yet with VMware.

However, you can do it with VMware in a less elegant way by booting from a Reflect iso in the vm amd restoring an image inside vm.

Another way of making Reflect backup of VM is to mount vhd on host (ok for vhdx format) and backup the contents of vhd using Reflect on host which is a vataint on how you do it.

I sometimes make an image backup of a host pc, and restore image to a vm so I have a virtual copy of host for test purposes.

In short, I find Reflect useful for some things in a vm, but actually backing up vm is not something I ever really bother with. It is easier just to copy the vhd but to be fair a Reflect backup takes less space.

So no, you are not doing it wrong - perfectly valid way of working. You are compressing the vms doing it your way as well.

There are times where doing your backups inside a VM can be helpful. Take this scenario which is what I have on my system:

I have a VM for the sole purpose of running as a Plex server. I won't go into the details here, but there is a very good reason for running it in a VM. The VM itself is fairly small because all the media used by Plex is on another HD.

The physical drive where my VM is located has a lot of other data (a couple of terrabytes) but it contains data that is temporary in nature and does not need to be backed up often. Also, substantial amounts of that data changes every day.

If I were to backup that entire physical HD I would have huge backups of data that I largely don't care about. The incremental updates would also be huge due to the amount of data changing.

My solution is to perform a backup from within the Plex VM. This way, I'm still getting a full disk image, but only of the Plex VM which is fairly small. It saves a lot of time and storage space for my backup. This also has the advantage of making a restore wicked quick. Create a new VM, don't even install an OS to it, boot the recovery media, do a restore (which takes only a few min), and boom - done. It also has the advantage of making my VM portable since I can restore just that VM to any drive on any system extraordinarily easily.

Point is simply that there are times where backups from within a VM can be extremely useful. This was simply one example.