Software > Applications (PUBLIC)
Paragon Adaptive Restore
Parrish:
So I found my new most favorite utility today. Ok, well to be honest I didn\'t find it just today- I discovered how powerful it is today. It\'s called Paragon Adapative Restore. I had originally downloaded it a few months ago as part of my Paragon Software license. We buy Paragon Hard Disk Manager from Paragon Software and use it on an almost daily basis. I\'ve been using PHDM for about 10 years now- it\'s an awesome app that allows you to perform changes to partitions (resize, move, backup, restore, etc) as well as recover files from damaged partitions, in addition to a host of other functions. It\'s definitely one of those tools every technician needs to have. It can be installed on Windows and it also has a WinPE boot version (both are included with the license). A few months ago I noticed that Paragon had added a utility that would, susposedly, allow you to restore an image of a drive to completely different hardware and make that OS bootable (Windows only). In other words, a bare metal restore.
I hadn\'t tried it until today- one of our customers is purchasing a new server and they want me to try and image the old server and install that image on the new hardware. Normally, to do that, you\'d need to at least do a Windows Repair Install- which on a server is not the most ideal thing to do.
So I figured this might be a good use for Paragon Adapative Restore. So I start digging through the software and documentation. Admitedly the documentation from Paragon is not the greatest- the knowledge base is essentially void of any reference to Adapative Restore (which, by the way, is also included with their Drive Backup application). I did eventualy find some good documentation in the help file itself (duh).
Turns out this application is much more powerful than I had first thought. At first I was thinking this application had to be used to create the image of the original drive then would modify that image by injecting the proper chipset and storage drivers into that image- then you\'d restore that image to the new hardware. However, that\'s not how it works- it\'s actually much more powerful.
Here is what you do. You make your image of the original drive and OS then restore that image to the new hardware (the same function as just backing up the partition and restoring it). Most of the time doing just this would result in a BSOD cycle with Windows where it fails because it cannot locate the proper chipset and/or storage controller. So, what you do now that you have the image restored to the new hardware you boot up with Paragon Adaptive Restore. This is a WinPE based boot disc.
Here is the fun part- you just click through the Adapative Restore wizard and it will scan the hard drive looking for Windows operating systems. Once it finds the correct OS you can then select that OS. At the next screen you are presented with three options. The first is \"Upload drivers automatically from the provided driver repository\". The second is \"Upload drivers manually\" and the third is \"Do not upload drivers\". What you\'ll need to do is download the driver files for your particular chipset and storage driver (many times all you\'ll need is the correct storage) and extract those drivers to something such as a USB flash drive. The drivers will need to be in the format where you can see the .inf files. If the drivers are an executable (such as with ATI\'s chipset utility) you\'ll need to extract the raw drivers from those applications- typically just running the app then going to the Temp folder in the user directory will allow you to find those extracted drivers.
Now that you have all your drivers onto a USB drive you can insert that USB drive into the new machine and Adapative Restore will be able to access it. If all the drivers are in a single folder you can use the first option: \"upload drivers automatically from the provided driver repository\". Selecting that option will allow you to browse to the driver folder on the USB drive and Adapative Restore will parse that folder and choose the appropriate drivers for your new hardware. Or you can select the second option: \"upload drivers manually\" and you can browse the USB drive and manually select the appropriate drivers. If you have the correct drivers they will shop up as a green check mark. If they are not the correct drivers they will shop up with a red x. Adaptive Restore uses the HAL in WinPE to scan the hardware and knows what you have.
Now that you\'ve selected the correct storage driver and chipset driver (again, you may not need the chipset driver) you continue through the wizard. You\'ll be presented with a screen where it warns you that the changes about to be made cannot be undone and you\'ll have to agree to make the changes. Once you select yes Adaptive Restore will then begin making changes to the Windows install on the hard drive. The process goes quickly- should be less than a minute. What it\'s doing is making changes to the Windows registry, HAL, system drivers folder, etc- it adds the drivers you selected previously to the Windows install.
Once done you can just reboot and bingo- you have a correctly booting Windows box!
Now, sit back and think about this for a minute- this is where I realized just how powerful this program is. At first I thought you had to use it in conjunction with Paragon Hard Disk Manager and the images it makes- but you don\'t. This program works directly on an existing Windows install. This means that you can use this app on ANY install of Windows (Windows 2000 on up that is)- be that one imaged from Acronis, Macrium Reflect, Ghost, etc. Or even one where you just took the hard drive out of an old box and installed it in a new. Or, as we did today in our shop, even just a machine where you had to change the motherboard because of a failure. Instead of running a Windows Repair Install we just fired up Adaptive Restore and used it to inject the proper drivers into the existing OS. 5 minutes later we had a correctly booting Windows XP box with an entirely different motherboard (went from Intel to an AMD).
And, apparently, this works with Vista and Windows 7 (I haven\'t tested it yet). If so, this means that you\'ll be able to make major hardware changes to your Vista or Windows 7 install (like installing a new motherboard) and be able to get Visa or 7 to boot. As many of you know- you can no longer do repair installs with Vista/7 as you did with XP. Paragon Adaptive Restore appears to solve that problem.
Oh, and just to make it even better- Adapative Restore can do the same to Virtual images and drives! It works with Virtual PC, Virtual Server, Hyper-V, VMWare Workstation, VMWare Fusion, and VMWare ESX Server. You can use Adaptive Restore to take an existing install of Windows and convert it to a virtual OS.
For those interested, here is the PDF for Adaptive Restore. You can read for yourself just how amazing this application is.
http://www.paragon-software.com/export/sites/paragonsoftware.com/docs/AR_eng240709.pdf
Also, here is the PDF for Paragon Hard Disk Manager. That might be a good read too as it will show you just how powerful this application is.
http://download.paragon-software.com/doc/manual_hdm2009pro_eng.pdf
It is much, much more than just a drive partition utility.
Todd Hughes:
Cool stuff.
(Almost as simple as tar\'ing up a drive and untarring it on the new hardware.)
Parrish:
thughes wrote:
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(Almost as simple as tar\'ing up a drive and untarring it on the new hardware.)
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Doesn\'t that require lots and lots of mineral spirits?:lol:
Todd Hughes:
--- Quote from: parrish ---
Doesn\'t that require lots and lots of mineral spirits?:lol:
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Nope, feathers. :P
Parrish:
thughes wrote:
--- Quote ---
--- Quote from: parrish ---
Doesn\'t that require lots and lots of mineral spirits?:lol:
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Nope, feathers. :P
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For the taring part yeah, but what about the untarring?
BTW,
I\'ve been testing AR quite a bit today. I found it works perfectly on XP, Server 2003 (tested on 32bit), Server 2008 (tested on 64bit), and Windows 7 (tested on 64bit). The hard drive controllers on these machines ranged from your basic SIS IDE controller, Adapatec 2100S SCSI RAID, SIL3114 SATA RAID, to a Silicon Image hardware RAID controller on the Win7 box. The SIL3114 and 2100S both required I load drivers off a USB drive so AR could see them- but that\'s super easy.
This is the WinPE boot disc version BTW- which is what you\'ll want to use anyway.
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