Disk2vhd 1.63

Disk2vhd is an emulating program developed by Sysinternals. It is used for creating Virtual Hard Disks (VHD) that can be used in Microsoft Hyper-V or Microsoft Virtual PCs. VHD is Microsoft’s official disk format for virtual machines. The program’s main feature is its ability to run on an online system. It utilizes Windows’ Volume Snapshot ability that enables it to emulate a hard disk from within the Windows operating system. Users can then run the emulated hard disk as a virtual machine or mount it as a disk.

The program creates a Virtual Hard Disk version for every disk where the chosen volumes are located. When doing this, Disk2vhd does not override the disk’s partitioning information. Instead, it only replicates the data for volumes on the selected disk. This allows users to capture the system volumes of the hard disk and not the data volumes. The program supports virtual disk sizes of up to 127GB. To use the VHDs created using this application, a virtual machine is required. Users must specify the desired VM characteristics then add the created VHD as IDE disks to the configuration of the virtual machine. The program also offers command-line options. This feature allows users to script VHD creation and specify the volumes.