Want to make a quick image with cmd

I have made a little video for someone on another forum who wanted to make a quick image and mount that image in order to retrieve some data. Don't ask me why he wanted to go that route. I made him a little video explaining the process and I want to share that with you. The video run for 7 minutes.

If you want to try it yourself, this is the command for imaging the C partition and all partitions needed for a proper operation (e.g. the system partition). This works from the iron or from virtual.

wbadmin start backup -backupTarget:X: -include:C: -AllCritical -quiet

Substitute 'X' with the drive letter of the partition where you want to place the image. If you want to image a data partition leave '-AllCritical' off and adjust the drive letters.

Note: If you mount the image, it comes without a drive letter but the mounted volume is present in Disk Management where you can assign a drive letter.

Good tutorial Wolfgang. A little long but very informative.

If I did this for my boot drive, could I then use the VHD in Oracle VirtualBox? Never done that, just curious.

Edit: This would be a good one to add to Kari's Video tutorial thread: https://www.tenforums.com/general-dis...s-members.html

Just made an image of my 8.1 boot drive: wbadmin start backup -backupTarget:F: -include:C: -AllCritical -quiet
Took about 12 minutes which is not bad, about the same as Acronis TI takes.

When I look at the F: drive this is what I see:



On the last image, what do I mount? I tried all 3 vhdx files and all give the same error:

Try it with your boot drive C: and use the -AllCritical parameter. When I did this it imaged two partitions and now will not mount as I described. I'm wuilling to try any ideas you might have.

BTW: This is fun stuff!!!

Can you show the folder and full file names like I did in post #4? I'd like to see what, if anything, is different.