Macrium viBoot - Create Virtual Machine using Macrium Image  

Just for background sake, I upgraded to Win10 Pro from Home less than a month ago, so I don't have "Zen" with virtual machines and Hyper-V. Please take that into consideration when I ask for clarification on the following.

Bree said:

I wouldn't use viBoot, not that there's anything wrong with it, just that it's unnecessary. You can create the Macrium rescue media as an ISO. If you set a Hyper-V VM to boot from that ISO you can use it to restore a Macrium image direct to the VM.

I've read this a half a dozen times, and contemplated it. I'm embarrassed to admit that I don't understand. Why would I go through the extra step of booting rescue media to restore a Macrium image instead of simply finding the MRIMG from within Reflect and clicking on "boot"? Or am I misunderstanding your point?...

I took a Macrium image of the drive, restored it to a VM, and it ran without a problem.

Are you saying you restored it with the Macrium ISO that you booted into in Hyper-V?
Any clarity you can add would be most helpful.

Silky said:

Why would I go through the extra step of booting rescue media to restore a Macrium image instead of simply finding the MRIMG from within Reflect and clicking on "boot"?

Actually you find the image from within viBoot, not Reflect, that's in Part Two of the tutorial.

Once you have created a new VM with viBoot from the .mrimg file, that file has to remain present at all times in order for the VM to run. That may be inconvenient if its on an external HDD. The original .mrimg file is never modified when used with viBoot, a second virtual drive is created to hold all the changes that occur when you run the VM.

Management of that VM is done through viBoot, but if you ever create a checkpoint for this VM then viBoot would loose sight of the VM. I suggested restoring the image rather than running it with viBoot because it will be less complicated to manage, there would be just the one virtual drive and you can disconnect the original .mrimge without affecting the VM.

Are you saying you restored it with the Macrium ISO that you booted into in Hyper-V?

Yes. I created a new virtual machine in Hyper-V Manager. When I got to the Installation Options I selected 'Install an operating system from a bootable CD/DVD-ROM' and selected the Macrium Recovery ISO I had made earlier as the image file.

As I recall, the easiest way to make the ,mrimg file available for the restore was to use Hyper-V manager to create a new virtulal hard disk, mount that .vhd file in File Explorer, then copy the .mrimg file to it. I then used Disk Management to dismount it and added it as a second hard drive in the VM's settings under the SCSI controller. Once the restore was complete the second drive was no longer needed I removed it from the VM and deleted the .vhd file.

If that sounds too complicated, the just use viBoot as you intended. It will work, but may be a little slow if the original .mrimg file is on an external usb HDD. My method ensures that the only virtual drive used by the VM in on the PC's own internal drive which would be faster, particularly if it is an SSD.

@Bree Thank you for the information. I'm going to study your reply and re-read the tutorial for completeness then try to get my Win7 VM running. I'm sure I'll have a difficulty so I'll be back, but in the meantime, many thanks for your considered help.

Good luck @Silky. If at first the restored VM won't boot, there's a 'fix windows boot problems' tool in the Macrium boot media.

Ok, so I have made an image of my win10 laptop running as domain client using macrium and the image boots with viboot.

I am trying to convert the *.mrimg file (around 80GB) to VHDX. But the changes I made in the system after booting with viboot are in a few other *.avhdx & vhdx files in macrium's folder around 16GB

I disabled checkpoints when viboot started booting.

Can anyone help and tell me how to have these avhdx files "applied" to the mrimg file ?