{"id":407,"date":"2009-10-08T15:24:23","date_gmt":"2009-10-08T20:24:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/?p=407"},"modified":"2009-10-08T15:24:23","modified_gmt":"2009-10-08T20:24:23","slug":"convert-physical-hard-disks-to-vhds-using-disk2vhd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/index.php\/2009\/10\/convert-physical-hard-disks-to-vhds-using-disk2vhd\/","title":{"rendered":"Convert Physical Hard Disks to VHDs using Disk2VHD"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There are numerous free and commercial physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversion tools on the market, but often they require some setup or at least a minimal initial investment.&#160; Sometimes, all you want to do is make a copy of a physical disk and then attach it to a virtual machine.&#160; The Disk2Vhd utility is a simple program for doing just that.&#160; Here\u2019s the info from the TechNet site:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk &#8211; Microsoft\u2019s 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\u2019s online. Disk2vhd uses Windows\u2019 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).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>You can download <a href=\"http:\/\/technet.microsoft.com\/en-nz\/sysinternals\/ee656415%28en-us%29.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">Disk2Vhd<\/a> directly from the Microsoft TechNet SysInternals site (it\u2019s only 704KB).&#160; You can then run it directly from your file system to launch the GUI.<\/p>\n<p>While it\u2019s easy to create a VHD, it\u2019s important to keep in mind potential issues with using this approach to \u201cclone\u201d an already-running machine.&#160; Depending on your environment, you might need to consider the impacts of network addresses, MAC addresses, computer names and Security Identifiers (SIDs).&#160; Most of this only applies if you\u2019re using this approach to clone a non-OS hard disk.&#160; Overall, the utility makes it really simple to perform a P2V conversion of a hard disk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are numerous free and commercial physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversion tools on the market, but often they require some setup or at least a minimal initial investment.&#160; Sometimes, all you want to do is make a copy of a physical disk and then attach it to a virtual machine.&#160; The Disk2Vhd utility is a simple program [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-systems-admin","category-virtualization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=407"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}