Those who have used PSExec.exe tool would know the power of tools that Sysinternal provided to Windows System Administrator for remote management, administration and to automate many of those tasks.
Disk2VHD is one of the tools released after Microsoft acquired Sysinternal. It is a very little but powerful tool that lets you convert entire hard disk or partition on the disk to .VHD, the Virtual Hard Disk file format of Microsoft Virtual PC and Hyper-V.
First download the tool from here. It would be a zip file which you need to extract to a folder. Upon extraction you would find 3 files in the folder a EULA.txt (End User License Agreement) file, disk2vhd.exe and Disk2vhd.chm help file.
Double click on the disk2vhd.exe to launch the program. This would launch the EULA if running the tool for the first time.
Clicking on Agree button would close EULA and launch the program
This would show all the drive partitions of the system. As in the above screenshot my server has C partition of 25 GB and E partition of 110 GB on a 135 GB direct attached storage. A 500 GB Seagate FreeAgent USB drive is attached on which the .VHD will be stored.
Select the partitions which are to be included while converting into .VHD and click Create
A window will popup asking for location to store the VHD. I selected to store it on the external USB drive.
The conversion process would start and will provide you the finish time as well. Once done we will have the VHD which can be connected to a Virtual Machine or mounted as a drive in Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2.
Downloads
Click here for Disk2VHD – Size 685 KB
Click here for Complete Sysinternal Suite – Size 12 MB
disk2vhd has been updated, to version 2, and now supports a live drive copying
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