Mirage Windows Migration – where are the files?

This is an interesting experience which I thought I share with the rest of the world.

I’ve been involved in some projects to migrate computers from Windows XP to Windows 7 using VMware Mirage. The greatest benefit of which is that the actual migration is expected to be fairly easy and straight forward. However, there can be road bumps along the way, one of which I will write about in this post.

This environment is in the healthcare sector and has a classic combination of Windows XP with Symantec Endpoint Protection. I am already aware that there are known protections which SEP puts in place which can interfere with USMT operations. Read more about that here. With that, we have well prepared in advance to make sure that VMware Mirage processes are appropriately configured to be “safe listed” in SEP, so that Tamperproof Protection ignores the actions of Mirage processes.

Interestingly enough, our test migrations failed to migrate the user profiles. We can see that in C:\Users\ all the user profiles have been created, but they are all blank. We expect everything to show up.

Further tests showed that if we were to stop SEP prior to migration, the profile migration will be successful, except that Microsoft Outlook profile goes missing.

Mirage and USMT logs will show that USMT exited with errorcode 71.

SEP logs did not show any errors related to Tamperproof Protection.

Eventually, thanks to the missing Outlook profile, it prompted me to go back and check if the USMT hotfix was correctly applied. (That’s the main reason to apply the patch in the first place) It turned out to be the real issue! The USMT hotfix was only applied to the x64 folder of USMT, but not the i386. The tests we have been doing are on 32bit desktops. We applied the patch and proceeded to test migrate.

True enough, all migrations thereafter were successful, even without the need to disable SEP. The culprit all along was a bad USMT upload.

So, if anyone needs this information, it is listed down below.

• Microsoft USMT 4 Hotfix URL – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2023591
• Make sure you get 2 files – 32bits – 427161_intl_i386_zip.exe & 32bits – 427161_intl_i386_zip.exe
• Follow the instructions to extract the files and replace the files in the respective USMT folders