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Sysinternals Disk2vhd helps migrate physical desktops to virtual machines
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.
Comments
9
Subscribe to commentsrobertOct 8th 2009 9:35AM
If only it was for Virtual Box instead of Virtual PC...
JasonOct 8th 2009 10:08AM
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...
robertOct 8th 2009 10:10AM
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.
polobunnyOct 8th 2009 10:30AM
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.
JustinOct 8th 2009 2:50PM
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!
polobunnyOct 8th 2009 3:01PM
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.
JustinOct 8th 2009 4:51PM
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.
nanomatrixOct 17th 2009 8:08PM
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.
matthewkuehnJan 5th 2010 5:20PM
Is there something similar (i.e. easy and free) I can use for my older Win2K computer?