How do I extract all the files in a VHD to a hard disk including permissions?

Question

I'd like to know wha thte best way is to make an exact copy of a vhd image and pu tit onto my hard disk. I've tried xcopy but there seems to be a number of issues rlated to permissions when doing this. Ideally I'd like to copy the bits so that they match exactly on the new drive. I encountered this when trying to restore a vista backup only to discover the idiots work who decided to not let me restore a 400 gig image to a 1 TB drive size.

I've sucessfully mounted the drive in Win 7 which is the environment in which I'm trying ot copy these files.

Answer 1

Robocopy does a much better job than XCopy at preservering ACLs, and like XCopy it's built into Vista/7

Answer 2

If I were trying to do this, I would create a virtual environment, attach the VHD file, boot from an ISO file with a hard drive cloning utility, and make an image of the virtual hard drive. I would then boot the cloning utility on the physical environment and write that image to the physical hard drive. You could cut out a step if you attached the hard drive to a USB adapter and had it pass through to the VM on the first step.

Here's a good list of utilities to use for cloning:

http://serverfault.com/questions/33069

Answer 3

xcopy has key about permissions try xcopy /? and read help

Answer 4

Be aware that XCOPY isn't going to preserve 8-dot-3 filenames. You can't copy them deterministically. That's one reason you can't just XCOPY Windows machines around to "clone" them and expect them to work. Until developers stop referencing 8-dot-3 filenames in their configuration files and registries, we're stuck with this behaviour.

If you want to restore a VHD image to a physical disk, you might have a look at WinImage. I haven't used the VHD functionality personally, but I've used previous version of WinImage to great success.