Create Virtual Images of Physical Disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC with Disk2vhd

Every tech enthusiast loves Sysinternals apps. Disk2vhd is the latest tool developed for inclusion in the Microsoft Sysinternals Suite. Disk2vhd is a lightweight portable utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk – Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks. These images can then be used in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs).

The process to create vhd versions of physical disks is very simple. When you start Disk2vhd, it will display the available physical disks. To create a vhd image of the disk, you need to select the path (where you want to save the vhd image) and give a name for the image and select the physical drive(s) that the virtual image are to be created of. You can also keep the default selections and create the image, if you don’t want to change anything. Disk2vhd will then create the vhd image which you can use later in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V.

It will create one VHD for each disk on which selected volumes reside. It preserves the partitioning information of the disk, but only copies the data contents for volumes on the disk that are selected. This enables you to capture just system volumes and exclude data volumes, for example.

Disk2vhd runs Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, Windows Vista, Windows 7, including x64 systems. You can download Disk2vhd at the Sysinternals’s website. You can even run it directly from http://live.sysinternals.com.

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