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

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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:

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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.

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This looks AWESOME for Win7/Windows Virtual PC usage…

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