Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Microsoft, Freeware
Sysinternals Disk2vhd helps migrate physical desktops to virtual machines
by Lee Mathews Oct 8th 2009 at 8:00AM
One day, Sysinternals will probably run out of ideas and stop releasing incredibly useful free apps for Windows administrators and technicians. That day isn't today, though.
Just released on TechNet is Disk2vhd, which is designed to create .vhd image files from physical hard drives. Like many other Sysinternals apps, Disk2vhd is tiny, free, and fully portable. It's also available on live.sysinternals.com so you can run it right over the internet should you forget your trusty flash drive at an inopportune time.
The tool is dead simple to use: launch the executable, browse for a destination, choose which physical drive you want to image, and click create. Disk2vhd creates a snapshot that you can then mount in Virtual PC or HyperV, or as a virtual hard drive on a Windows 7 system.
Disk2vhd is compatible with Windows XP SP2 or newer. One word of warning: images over 127GB are not bootable in Virtual PC, so keep under the limit if that happens to be in your plans.
Just released on TechNet is Disk2vhd, which is designed to create .vhd image files from physical hard drives. Like many other Sysinternals apps, Disk2vhd is tiny, free, and fully portable. It's also available on live.sysinternals.com so you can run it right over the internet should you forget your trusty flash drive at an inopportune time.
The tool is dead simple to use: launch the executable, browse for a destination, choose which physical drive you want to image, and click create. Disk2vhd creates a snapshot that you can then mount in Virtual PC or HyperV, or as a virtual hard drive on a Windows 7 system.
Disk2vhd is compatible with Windows XP SP2 or newer. One word of warning: images over 127GB are not bootable in Virtual PC, so keep under the limit if that happens to be in your plans.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
robert said 9:35AM on 10-08-2009
If only it was for Virtual Box instead of Virtual PC...
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Jason said 10:08AM on 10-08-2009
I believe the VBoxManage command line utility will do the conversion from VHD format to VDI for you. Google for "VBoxManage converthd vhd" and you should find the syntax you need...
robert said 10:10AM on 10-08-2009
Awesome! Thanks Jason - I'll try that out when I get home tonight. Very excited now as I've been wanting to convert one of my old machines into a VM but didn't know how to go about doing so.
polobunny said 10:30AM on 10-08-2009
Furthermore I believe even the VirtualBox GUI can convert the images. You select the VHD in the virtual media manager and it will ask you about converting, if I recall correctly. Then it's a matter of creating a similar machine that matches the VHD and you're good to go.
Justin said 2:50PM on 10-08-2009
Anyone thought of trying it on a Mac OS partition from within Windows? I havent even used it yet, so it may not recognize it, but someone has to try!
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polobunny said 3:01PM on 10-08-2009
I doubt that would work. Just look at OSX86 guide for VMware...
http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Vmware_how_to
Way too lengthy to work with a simple image of a drive I think.
Justin said 4:51PM on 10-08-2009
I figured it would not be so easy/possible. But I would be shocked if no one tries it out. I have neither the time nor a mac/hac in order to even give it a shot.
nanomatrix said 8:08PM on 10-17-2009
I actually made a VHD of my Vista Ultimate, loaded as a disk in my Virtual Box (left the VHD as is) and booted up just fine. You may want to go into the settings for the image and make sure the virtual cpu # matches your real CPU installation among other things. I have only run this image on the machine I imaged on and it works, I haven't tried other machines.
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matthewkuehn said 5:20PM on 1-05-2010
Is there something similar (i.e. easy and free) I can use for my older Win2K computer?
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