Macrium Viboot Tips

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.