This article contains information about how to reverse an image from a virtual disk to a local hard disk with VMware ESX4.

Background

It is often necessary in a Provisioning Services environment to reverse an image to install a Citrix hotfix, change a driver, or do certain other tasks. To achieve this, you must reverse your virtual disk to a local disk.

Note: For Provisioning Service 5.x, [ Hotfix CPVS56SP1E011 - For Citrix Provisioning Services 5.1, 5.1 SP1, 5.1 SP2, 5.6 and 5.6 SP1] (VDA) must be installed on the Master target to use the VMware network driver VMXNET3.

Instructions

Complete the following steps to reverse the image:

1. Set up Provisioning Services to boot from the virtual disk.

2. Set up your virtual machine associated to the virtual disk to boot from the network.

3. If you do not have a local hard disk attached to the virtual machine, add a new hard disk with a size equal to or larger than the virtual disk size.

4. Start your machine and format the disk attached to the virtual machine.

5. Go to the command prompt and run the diskpart command to display the state of the volumes (list volume).

6. Note the number associated to the partitions.

7. Select the partition that you added and formatted previously (example: select partition=1).

8. Type Active to make the new partition active.
   Note: If you do not follow this step, you cannot boot from the partition after using XenConvert.

9. Use XenConvert (2.3 in this example) to convert from Volume to Volume (this is the only option available when you convert from a virtual disk to a VMware virtual machine)
   When the XenConvert has completed, you should be able to boot from the hard disk after changing the setting from the Provisioning Services console.