Xen users - Mar 2011 - migration of old ghost image files/backup-ed systems

Greetings,

I need to provide access to some rather old systems for which there is no
physical box anymore - were discarded several years ago.
However, I need to revive these old systems for which I have only Ghost
backups.
A couple of these systems are Windows 2000 SP3, one Windows 2000 Server, a
couple of Windows XP SP2, and one Windows XP SP1.
I can create LVs for each of them, and I might have access to their file
systems in their respective LVs.

What would be a common procedure to follow to be able to have all these
systems boot properly?

Would it be possible to create a "local" network inside the DomUs to
which
only these DomUs can have access?

Please be as detailed as you can with your suggestions since I am in a very
"hostile territory" and I need ALL the help I can get.

Many thanks,

Frank

P.S. Dom0 is a CentOS 5.5 64bit systems running XEN 3.4.3


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On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 2:18 AM, fpt stl <fptstl@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I need to provide access to some rather old systems for which there is no
> physical box anymore - were discarded several years ago.
Who made that decision? You might need to hunt them down and tell them
to take responsibility.
> However, I need to revive these old systems for which I have only Ghost
> backups.
> A couple of these systems are Windows 2000 SP3, one Windows 2000 Server, a
> couple of Windows XP SP2, and one Windows XP SP1.
The first thing you should do is found out if there''s some kind of
restore manual that whoever created the backups wrote.
> I can create LVs for each of them, and I might have access to their file
> systems in their respective LVs.
>
> What would be a common procedure to follow to be able to have all these
> systems boot properly?
That may or may not be possible.

I''m not familiar with ghost backup, but I suggest you try restoring it
on a physical machine first (e.g. laptop). If it doesn''t work then
you''re pretty much screwed.

The main reason is that old version of Windows only load specific disk
controller drivers that exists in the system at that time. Moving the
image (or the hard disk, which is the same thing) to another computer
might result in no driver for the disk controller, which results in
BSOD. So plain image dump (like with dd) is only restorable to another
machine with (mostly) identical hardware.

VMware''s P2V tools is smart enough to install generic disk controller
driver before creating an image, you if you have a backup image from
those kinds of tools you should be able to restore it to virtual
machines.

If Ghost behaves like VMWare P2V, then you should be able to restore
it to another machine (whether physical or virtual). If not, then good
luck finding a replica of your old hardware.

Then there''s licensing issue. Some types of license (e.g. OEM license)
is invalidated when you move to hardware from a different vendor, so
you end up with Windows saying invalid license or need to reactivate
your product.
>
> Would it be possible to create a "local" network inside the DomUs
to which
> only these DomUs can have access?
Create a dummy bridge not connected to any physical NIC. See you OS
documentation on details how to do this.

-- 
Fajar

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On 3/10/2011 2:04 PM, Fajar A. Nugraha wrote:
> The main reason is that old version of Windows only load specific disk
> controller drivers that exists in the system at that time. Moving the
> image (or the hard disk, which is the same thing) to another computer
> might result in no driver for the disk controller, which results in
> BSOD. So plain image dump (like with dd) is only restorable to another
> machine with (mostly) identical hardware.
With Win2k/XP/2k3, booting with the installation media and selecting the 
"install" and then "repair" operation (notably, *not* the
initial
"repair" on the first screen) should allow you to get around that 
particular flavor of BSOD, at least on bare hardware, because it 
replaces the drivers while keeping most other settings intact.

Are you sure that writing those images out and then directly accessing 
individual files from another, working, Windows install (or Linux with 
NTFS drivers) wouldn''t fit your needs, Frank? It may be a bit easier,
if
you just need to pull out some old data.

-John

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> However, I need to revive these old systems for which I have only Ghost
> backups.
> A couple of these systems are Windows 2000 SP3, one Windows 2000 Server, a
> couple of Windows XP SP2, and one Windows XP SP1.
> I can create LVs for each of them, and I might have access to their file
> systems in their respective LVs.
>

If you only need to recover files from those images, use Ghost
Explorer.  That should save you a lot of headaches.

-- 
Matt

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