USMT Mig files with Windows Easy Transfer (or other "easy" alternatives)

[bkaler]

I had everything working well (seemingly) and mig files being generated, my simple task sequences to run a USMT backup stores the MIG file in the appropriate folder. The restore sequence also seems to (mostly) work, after creating a 350GB Mig from my old PC and transferring to a newly imaged machine.

 

Problem is if this fails for whatever reason, and Imaging Associate #3532 gets flustered, what's my recourse to tell them? Well the MIG files are supposed to be Windows Easy Transfer compatible right? WRONG! I punch my encryption key (Below) into the Easy Transfer wizard and get a nice error along the lines of "no can do bub" - I mean "Windows Easy Transfer couldn't open the file" - same difference. Found migrecover.exe, also the migviewer.exe gui that Simon created but both of them seem to spit out (corrupted) files *literally, the files all end in (corrupted)*

 

Mega-long recovery key:

 

7pjfttlmuwuDTnswp0olX+4mambiArGIWtpnUD6yzWLA+bgcFpdr6rH/OD4B5UyDU3Ewup+EW0cyyV+xvl5NCYcP+npQYkL1aVQ7NReHPGDLvs3x3gHGz+O1l+qNZxKM90P3hvvseogosrzBd47B8dCSp8Ls9yTs0vXeWvMxmUJRb7/1t4pTqCE4ZD7523E2QvkkjLI3JHNLQS2icWbfMrGInXSj4kkMwQDFKe3R+1nuEx8ATi2S2Laeldx4kC7Zq

 

(fudged a few random letters for security)

 

Is there something I'm missing perhaps, does my key above even look correct? The keys I've seen posted elsewhere seem to be a little more friendly 256-bit keys, not this 2048bit+ monstrosity. I'll need to be able to sell the fact that I can extract a MIG file should the task sequence decide to fail, does everyone just use loadstate.exe with the magical command line parameters to make everything groovy?

 

Nobody seems to be having much problem with this, but I wanted to sell USMT as a better alternative to our standard "just copy their mydocs folder and let god sort em out" process it currently is, but if it's not fully robust enough to recover some of their files if things go a bit sideways because something wasn't quite standard (in my test it failed because the local admin account wasn't renamed yet, something we do in policy).

 

Just curious what everyone else is doing.

[life24]

I wont to share my experience with this issue.

I had the same problem as you and found working solution in TechNet - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh824962.aspx.

Try to use usmtutils with the /extract option.