Restoring Vista backups onto XP

[Guest]

I am going away on holiday and am taking my Vista backup disc with me. The
problem is that the machine I have use of is an XP machine. I suspect it wont
allow me to restore to it. What can be done to get around this potential
problem ?

 

[Jill Zoeller [MSFT]]

Vista file backups are .zip files, so theoretically you could just extract
the files you want from each zip, though in some cases files are split
across the zips and you'd need to recombine them. The other idea I had was
to take a Complete PC Backup and store that on DVD. From XP, you can install
the Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Beta and use the vhdmount utility to mount
the backup vhd file. The result is that your backup is mounted like a
volume, and you can pick whichever files you want to copy to your XP
machine.

Here are a couple pointers for mounting .vhd files:
http://community.bartdesmet.net/blogs/bart/archive/2006/09/02/4385.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2006/09/01/734435.aspx

 

[AJR]

Another option - use Acronis True Image backup which permits virtual HD
mounts.

 

[Guest]

Thanks Jill - fortunately I didn't need to restore any files whilst I was
away. I do like the sound of the second option and will trial it.