Manual driver extraction from VMware tools

This article applies to:

• Acronis Backup (Advanced) 11.7 and Acronis Universal Restore Tool
• Acronis Backup (Advanced) 11.5 and Acronis Universal Restore Tool
• Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5
• Acronis Small Office: Cloud Server Backup Acronis Universal Restore
• True Image 2013 by Acronis Plus Pack
• Acronis True Image 2014 Premium
• Acronis True Image 2015

Introduction

This article provides instructions on how to extract virtual hardware drivers which are bundled with VMware Tools during migration of backups from Windows machines to VMware Workstation.

This may be necessary when you want to extract drivers to add them manually to a virtual machine without installing VMware Tools, or when creating templates for Windows deployment.

Solution

To extract the drivers which are bundled with VMware Tools:

1. Load the VMware Tools ISO into the virtual CD/DVD drive (for example, D:\):
   

   The common path for the ISO file is C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\windows.iso

2. Browse to the C: drive (that is, the system or data drive) and create a folder named Extract:
   
3. Open a command prompt (Start -> run -> cmd) and change directories to the D:\ drive (cd d:\):
   
4. Run the command:
   
   setup.exe /a /p c:\extract
   
   
5. If you are prompted to provide the location for the install/extraction, enter C:\Extract (the folder you created in Step 2).
6. When the process completes, click Finish.
7. Browse to the C:\Extract folder to access the extracted drivers.
   (!) As a result only drivers for the used operating system are unpacked.