Disk2vhd Turns Your PC Into a Virtual Machine

Sysinternals application Disk2vhd takes a snapshot of your PC, and turns it into a Microsoft Virtual PC virtual hard drive—while your system is up and running. Using the software, which requires no installation, is as easy as launching, selecting the drives you would like to create into a virtual disk, giving the file a name, and clicking the Create button. The utility uses the same volume snapshot feature that Windows uses for backup utilities, so it doesn't matter if software is running or not—but you'll have best results if you create the virtual disk on a separate drive.


(Edit, to draft, Slurp)

Copy this whole post to another site

cancel

select site advertising consumerist deadspin defamer fleshbot gay fleshbot gawker gizmodo idolator io9 jalopnik jezebel kotaku lifehacker valleywag artists gawkershop sploid

Windows only: Free Sysinternals application Disk2vhd takes a snapshot of your PC, and turns it into a Microsoft Virtual PC virtual hard drive—while your system is up and running.
Using the software, which requires no installation, is as easy as launching, selecting the drives you would like to create into a virtual disk, giving the file a name, and clicking the Create button. The utility uses the same volume snapshot feature that Windows uses for backup utilities, so it doesn't matter if software is running or not—but you'll have best results if you create the virtual disk on a separate drive.
Once you've created your virtual drive, you can use the free Microsoft Virtual PC to boot the image of your PC, which you can then use for testing, or just as a great way to completely backup your computer. Disk2vhd is a free download for Windows only.

Disk2vhd v1.0 [Windows Sysinternals]

Doesn't work for me. Has anyone seen this actually work?

I created a VHD from my Win 7 32-bit disk (not my current boot disk).

When I try to attach it to a new virtual machine, the response is, "Cannot attach the virtual hard disk to the virtual machine. Check the values provided and try again."

When I try to attach to an existing VM, I see, "The Virtual hard disk image...is too large for the IDE bus.Make sure that all virtual hard disk images connected to the IDE bus are not greater than 127.5 GB."

The physical partition is much smaller than 127.5 GB (61GB). The VHD file is 15GB.

I wonder if you're running into the issue that's referenced at the Microsoft Technet site:

[Quote]
Note: do not attach to VHDs on the same system on which you created them if you plan on booting from them. If you do so, Windows will assign the VHD a new disk signature to avoid a collision with the signature of the VHD’s source disk. Windows references disks in the boot configuration database (BCD) by disk signature, so when that happens Windows booted in a VM will fail to locate the boot disk.
[End Quote]