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.

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 08 '09 at 20:51

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

answered Jul 08 '09 at 20:51

robocopy sourcedriveletter:\ destinationdriveletter:\ /E /COPYALL – Oskar Duveborn Aug 05 '09 at 22:44

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:14

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:

Looking for a free and reliable alternative to Norton Ghost

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 20 '09 at 18:10

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

answered Jun 20 '09 at 18:10

Alexander Pavluchenko

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/O Copies file ownership and ACL information. – Joseph Jun 20 '09 at 18:15
and when I get access denied errors such as wehn trying to copy the bootmgr folder? – Middletone Jun 20 '09 at 18:18
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if you should copy system files- better way create disk image- then restore it to hdd – Alexander Pavluchenko Jun 23 '09 at 04:50

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 20 '09 at 19:31

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.

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

4 Answers4