Paragon Hard Disk Manager Pro 50% off at BDJ

[xtabber]

Paragon Hard Disk Manager Pro is 50% off ($49.97) on BDJ today.

Paragon HDM Pro includes the functionality of nearly all of the various Paragon utilities in a single package - Backup/restore, cloning, OS migration, virtualization, disk & partition management, recovery media creation, etc...

[tomos]

Anyone with expereince of P2V:
would I be able to create an image of my current install (Windows 7) and add it as a virtual machine to another machine, say when I move to a new one, say with Windows 10?

[tomos]

BDJ seems to be broken :-/
Paypal button doesnt work in three different browsers.
Unable to login with facebook. I appear to have registered at some stage, somehow got logged in with no password, maybe lastpass did it, but have it setup to not login automatically. Weird.
Giving up (sleep calls / up early)

[x16wda]

I have not actually done this, but that is one of the features they tout. I have had good success with Paragon software for years.

[x16wda]

Tomos - I had to use Internet Explorer to get the link to work. Then I washed my hands.

[tomos]

Tomos - I had to use Internet Explorer to get the link to work. Then I washed my hands.

-x16wda (December 04, 2016, 04:32 PM)

hmm, thanks, unfortunately didnt work in IE, FF or PaleMoon here...
Never mind, got it working [user error ]

[tomos]

Never mind, got it working [user error ]

-tomos (December 04, 2016, 04:34 PM)

it's one of those nights:
got the paypal button working, but now BDJ are insisting I give their password, with no option for reporting lost password.
Just ignore me ;-)

I give up -- I dont remember this being so difficult before (I've no login info in lastpass for BDJ), but it's late and I tired, and their 'or' choices are confusing.

[mwb1100]

Anyone with expereince of P2V:
would I be able to create an image of my current install (Windows 7) and add it as a virtual machine to another machine, say when I move to a new one, say with Windows 10?

-tomos (December 04, 2016, 02:30 PM)

It was long enough ago that I'm not sure what Windows versions were involved (though I can guarantee that the new host for the VM was not Win 8 or newer), so I'm not sure how relevant my experience would be today.  But I did this kind of thing and it worked well enough.  I think the machine I turned into a VM was a WinXP machine.  I am sure it didn't have GPT partitions, just MBR partitions.

Again - it was long enough ago that I wouldn't feel right saying you'll have no problems. But it did work for me.

I'm sure that it goes without saying that you should not decommission the old machine until you've verified that things are working...

[tomos]

Anyone with expereince of P2V:
would I be able to create an image of my current install (Windows 7) and add it as a virtual machine to another machine, say when I move to a new one, say with Windows 10?

-tomos (December 04, 2016, 02:30 PM)

It was long enough ago that I'm not sure what Windows versions were involved (though I can guarantee that the new host for the VM was not Win 8 or newer), so I'm not sure how relevant my experience would be today.  But I did this kind of thing and it worked well enough.  I think the machine I turned into a VM was a WinXP machine.  I am sure it didn't have GPT partitions, just MBR partitions.

Again - it was long enough ago that I wouldn't feel right saying you'll have no problems. But it did work for me.

I'm sure that it goes without saying that you should not decommission the old machine until you've verified that things are working...

-mwb1100 (December 04, 2016, 11:32 PM)

thanks

I invested in the end:
machine getting older, windows 7 still running very well though, with some very old software. So the P2V might be worth a try at some stage.

[4wd]

Probably means a new version is about to come, usually happens just outside the 3 month free upgrade period they give 

[xtabber]

Anyone with expereince of P2V:
would I be able to create an image of my current install (Windows 7) and add it as a virtual machine to another machine, say when I move to a new one, say with Windows 10?

-tomos (December 04, 2016, 02:30 PM)

I did just that this past summer, when an intermittent motherboard problem forced me to replace my primary desktop system before I had planned to. Win7 Pro 64-bit to a VMware virtual machine. The whole process was point & click simple and worked the first time without a hitch.  I didn't even have to reactivate Windows in the VM, although that could be a fluke. My only complaint is that it didn't have an option for a split file VM, which I prefer for portability.

This is not the first time I have done a P2V with Paragon HDM Pro -- a few years ago, I converted my last working XP system to a VM, which I still use occasionally for some older software, but I was still surprised at how easy the whole process has become in the current version of HDM Pro.

A few years ago, Paragon changed their backup file format to a proprietary compressible virtual machine, which HDM PRo can convert to any of the virtual machine formats they support. That means that, if you regularly back up your system by imaging the system partition with Paragon software and save the backup files, you can, in theory, always resurrect a dead system or a previous version to a working VM in any of those virtualization environments.  I haven't tried the other VM formats, but I know from personal experience that this works very well with VMware Workstation.

[Shades]

VMware used to have software that converts your physical system to a virtual one. And they offered it for free. I remember using it successfully to convert my own XP machine this way. At the time they also offered software to convert a virtual system to a physical system too.

As I am too lazy to look, I assume VMware still offers these software packages. Not sure if it would still be freeware though. In any case, if doing such conversions is your goal, it is usually a safe(r) bet to use the software from VMware to convert to a VMware virtual machine. After all, VMware knows its own software best...

Oracle's VirtualBox software doesn't have this option as far as I know (again, to lazy to look myself). Perhaps QuEmu supports conversion too.

[tomos]

. . . an intermittent motherboard problem forced me to replace my primary desktop system before I had planned to. Win7 Pro 64-bit to a VMware virtual machine. The whole process was point & click simple and worked the first time without a hitch.  I didn't even have to reactivate Windows in the VM, although that could be a fluke. My only complaint is that it didn't have an option for a split file VM, which I prefer for portability.

This is not the first time I have done a P2V with Paragon HDM Pro -- a few years ago, I converted my last working XP system to a VM, which I still use occasionally for some older software, but I was still surprised at how easy the whole process has become in the current version of HDM Pro.

A few years ago, Paragon changed their backup file format to a proprietary compressible virtual machine, which HDM PRo can convert to any of the virtual machine formats they support. That means that, if you regularly back up your system by imaging the system partition with Paragon software and save the backup files, you can, in theory, always resurrect a dead system or a previous version to a working VM in any of those virtualization environments.

-xtabber (December 05, 2016, 07:10 AM)

thanks for that
sounds good

Probably means a new version is about to come, usually happens just outside the 3 month free upgrade period they give 

-4wd (December 05, 2016, 12:10 AM)

so it'll probably be full price or more in the end. How to get hooked in...