The process to run physical disks into vhd images is as simple as possible. The program will display the available physical disks of the computer system upon startup. All that it takes to create a vhd image is to select a path and name for the image (or keep the default suggestion) and select the physical drives that the virtual image should be created of (or keep the default selection).

Disk2vhd will then create the virtual image which can then be used in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V. One of the benefits of using the Sysinternals program is that it can create virtual images of physical drives in Windows

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.

Usage instructions:

To use VHDs produced by Disk2vhd, create a VM with the desired characteristics and add the VHDs to the VM’s configuration as IDE disks. On first boot, a VM booting a captured copy of Windows will detect the VM’s hardware and automatically install drivers, if present in the image. If the required drivers are not present, install them via the Virtual PC or Hyper-V integration components. You can also attach to VHDs using the Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 Disk Management or Diskpart utilities.

Disk2vhd is compatible with all Microsoft operating systems since Windows XP SP2 including Windows Vista, Windows 7 and their 64-bit editions. A download is available at the Sysinternals website. It is furthermore possible to run the tool directly from live.sysinternals.com. (via Lee at Download Squad)

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Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007 is one of the applications that can be used to run virtual systems on a single computer system. It has been optimized for Microsoft operating systems but can also be used to install and run operating systems from other developers. Setting up a virtual machine is actually a very straightforward easy process.

Virtual PC 2007 provides the option to create a virtual machine or to add an existing virtual machine from an vmc file which is good for distributing virtual machines to multiple computer systems.

Each virtual machine will be stored in an vmc file on the computer’s hard drive from where it can be accessed at anytime using Virtual Pc 2007. Most Microsoft operating systems can be selected from a list which would automatically adjust the computer memory, virtual disk size and sound capabilities. Selecting Other is a custom option to define those parameters individually.

New operating systems can be installed from CD, DVD or an iso image located on the computer’s hard drive or network drive. To boot the virtual machine from CD one would select CD from the top menu of the virtual console and pick the CD / DVD drive that contains the boot image. ISO images can be mounted and booted from as well.

The virtual machine will then start the installation of the operating system which might take some time. One important key combination is [CTRL ALT DEL] to get out of the virtual machine’s window and be able to access the normal operating system.

Each virtual operating system that gets created will be available as long as the vmc file on the hard drive remains. A user could use Windows XP as his standard operating system and use virtual machines for Linux, Windows Vista and Windows 95 on the same system without difficulties.

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