How to best convert a fully encrypted drive into a Virtual Machine?

Question

I have a Windows XP laptop that uses GuardianEdge's Encryption Plus to fully encrypt the drive from bootup. What I would like to do is install a much larger (unencrypted) hard drive with Windows 7 on the laptop and turn this fully encrypted drive into a Virtual Machine that can be ran in either Virtualbox or VMWare on the Windows 7 host.

I've read many howto's that talk about using an imaging tool like Acronis True Image to image the drive then passing that through VMWare's VCenter Converter to turn it into a format that VMWare can understand. Unfortunately this seems to all far apart when you are dealing with a fully encrypted drive because Acronis cannot recognize the file system and attempts to do a sector-by-sector copy of the entire hard drive. This is extremely wasteful since the drive is 120GB but the file system is only using 10GB of that. Even if I were OK with going with an inefficient 120GB sector-by-sector copy, I'm not sure that I could even restore and run this under VMWare or Virtualbox.

Unfortunately, the Guardian Edge boot-time login comes up only after the hard drive has been selected as the boot device; preventing me from being able to decrypt the drive prior to booting an Acronis True Image CD so that it can recognize the underlying file system.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to want to do this but I am having a heck of a time finding solutions to this problem. All suggested/answers welcomed.

Thanks

Answer 1

You could decrypt the drive first using the GE Recover CD(FTP Link). For 10GB of data a decryption shouldn't take too long. GE would still be installed afterward and you could re-encrypt after using acronis and the converter. I think you might also be able to use the access utility do decrpyt it but I haven't used it myself.

Answer 2

I've not tried this on encrypted drives, but what about some P2V software that runs inside Windows? That way the disk copy should take place on top of GE's decryption.

Give Disk2vhd a go. If that doesn't take, I've personally had success with using VMware vCenter Converter to image unencrypted drives while XP is running.

Hopefully one of the two should create a usable image.

Answer 3

I'd try using imagex from the WAIK to create a wim file and redeploy it to my target machine. You should be able to stick the access utility on the waik boot cd and then create the image

Answer 4

HD Access utility wants the GE HD mounted first. I would also like to know how to get this to work on a GUI PE disk vs the system admin PE console disk. Im sure its possible, One can use the PE disk with the GE admin account to do an image using any command line image utility or even ghost32.exe You could then load that image to your virtual HDD. My problem isnt getting the image, I want a Gui way to run file recovery and work on OS issues, to do this I need to mount the GE HDD for my utility CD to access. If anyone has done this please post, I have a Win7 PE boot disk using My7PE script which works great. Thanks