Many of you will have used Macrium Viboot which enables you to open a Macrium Image in a Hyper-V virtual machine (now possible with Virtualbox as well but tips here are somewhat Hyper-V orientated).
Tip 1 - Test an image is ok.
Many use the "verify" function when creating an image backup.
Open the image file in ViBoot is a great way to check if image has been backed up correctly - if it opens, it is fine.
Tip 2 - Personalise a ViBoot VM.
Viboot VMs are always unactivated and so you cannot do any changes to personalisation.
However, you can turn off Viboot VM, attach the differential file to an activated VM (same edition of course), personalise it as you wish, then close activated VM.
Then if you start ViBoot VM, you will see the changes to personalisation.
Tip 3 - Make a permanent copy of the Viboot vhdx files
If you delete a Viboot VM from Viboot interface, it also deletes the Viboot VHDs.
Viboot uses differencing VHDs, and you cannot directly copy these elsewhere.
However, you can merge the parent and child (differencing) vhdx files to a normal vhdx file and save in a different directory.
To do this, go to Hyper-V "edit disk" menu, select merge option, and choose the differencing file to be merged, and select path and name of new merged file (need to put .vhdx extension in name of new one). This can take a while.
Admittedly, you can do much the same by creating a blank vhd and restoring to blank vhd with Reflect if you prefer - the above method allows you to create a vhd when you have made changes to vm, without backing up changes to an image file.
Tip 1 - Test an image is ok.
Many use the "verify" function when creating an image backup.
Open the image file in ViBoot is a great way to check if image has been backed up correctly - if it opens, it is fine.
Tip 2 - Personalise a ViBoot VM.
Viboot VMs are always unactivated and so you cannot do any changes to personalisation.
However, you can turn off Viboot VM, attach the differential file to an activated VM (same edition of course), personalise it as you wish, then close activated VM.
Then if you start ViBoot VM, you will see the changes to personalisation.
Tip 3 - Make a permanent copy of the Viboot vhdx files
If you delete a Viboot VM from Viboot interface, it also deletes the Viboot VHDs.
Viboot uses differencing VHDs, and you cannot directly copy these elsewhere.
However, you can merge the parent and child (differencing) vhdx files to a normal vhdx file and save in a different directory.
To do this, go to Hyper-V "edit disk" menu, select merge option, and choose the differencing file to be merged, and select path and name of new merged file (need to put .vhdx extension in name of new one). This can take a while.
Admittedly, you can do much the same by creating a blank vhd and restoring to blank vhd with Reflect if you prefer - the above method allows you to create a vhd when you have made changes to vm, without backing up changes to an image file.
My Computer
System One
-
- OS
- Windows 11 Pro + Win11 Canary VM.
- Computer type
- Laptop
- Manufacturer/Model
- ASUS Zenbook 14
- CPU
- I9 13th gen i9-13900H 2.60 GHZ
- Motherboard
- Yep, Laptop has one.
- Memory
- 16 GB soldered
- Graphics Card(s)
- Integrated Intel Iris XE
- Sound Card
- Realtek built in
- Monitor(s) Displays
- laptop OLED screen
- Screen Resolution
- 2880x1800 touchscreen
- Hard Drives
- 1 TB NVME SSD (only weakness is only one slot)
- PSU
- Internal + 65W thunderbolt USB4 charger
- Case
- Yep, got one
- Cooling
- Stella Artois (UK pint cans - 568 ml) - extra cost.
- Keyboard
- Built in UK keybd
- Mouse
- Bluetooth , wireless dongled, wired
- Internet Speed
- 900 mbs (ethernet), wifi 6 typical 350-450 mb/s both up and down
- Browser
- Edge
- Antivirus
- Defender
- Other Info
- TPM 2.0, 2xUSB4 thunderbolt, 1xUsb3 (usb a), 1xUsb-c, hdmi out, 3.5 mm audio out/in combo, ASUS backlit trackpad (inc. switchable number pad)
Macrium Reflect Home V8
Office 365 Family (6 users each 1TB onedrive space)
Hyper-V (a vm runs almost as fast as my older laptop)
