Wednesday, October 07, 2009

New Sysinternals utility released today, Disk2vhd v1.0 – Yes, creating a VHD from a physical hard drive, even an online one, is now a couple clicks away…

Sysinternals - Disk2vhd v1.0

“By Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell

Published: October 7, 2009

Introduction

Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online. Disk2vhd uses Windows’ Volume Snapshot capability, introduced in Windows XP, to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include in a conversion. You can even have Disk2vhd create the VHDs on local volumes, even ones being converted (though performance is better when the VHD is on a disk different than ones being converted).

The Disk2vhd user interface lists the volumes present on the system:

ee656415_Disk2vhd_01(en-us,MSDN_10)

Note: do not attach to VHDs on the same system on which you created them if you plan on booting from them. If you do so, Windows will assign the VHD a new disk signature to avoid a collision with the signature of the VHD’s source disk. Windows references disks in the boot configuration database (BCD) by disk signature, so when that happens Windows booted in a VM will fail to locate the boot disk.

Disk2vhd runs Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, and higher, including x64 systems.

image

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This looks AWESOME for Win7/Windows Virtual PC usage…

(via @jamestenniswoodFantastic utility for Window 7 users... Disk2vhd http://ow.ly/teMr)

4 comments:

David Morton said...

Believe it or not, I was just looking for something like this recently. Very cool. This will be a huge benefit especially now that Windows 7 supports booting from a vhd.

Brian Keller said...

Booyah! Good find, Greg. I've seen similar tools before but to have the "sysinternals" brand gives me a high degree of faith in using this one.

rwg said...

What product can be used to boot this file as a virtual machine? I tried installing several different flavors of Microsoft's Virtual PC on my Windows 7 64 bit machine, but none work to open this VHD file. Actually 30 Meg the thing called Virtual PC 2007 will not even run. The other installations seemed to install some KB but gave me no program to VM to this file.

Greg said...

"Windows Virtual PC" http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx
Click on the "Don’t need XP Mode and want VPC only? Download Windows Virtual PC without Windows XP Mode." to just get the options/instructions for "Windows Virtual PC"