14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has updated a Windows Sysinternals tool designed to create Virtual Hard Disk images out of physical disks. Disk2vhd 1.0 was launched in October 2009, and now the Redmond company is up to version 1.6. The latest release of the utility brings to the table bug fixes as well as overall improvements set up to make sure that customers making VHD equivalents of their physical hard drives will be able to run them as smooth as possible.
“Disk2vhd now includes better error handling for failed snapshots, guarantees that the system is bootable even if the system crashes while Disk2vhd is updating the system to make it compatible with Virtual PC, and supports direct-attached Hyper-V SCSI disks,” revealed Curtis Metz, program manager, Microsoft Sysinternals.
Following the creation of VHD images out of physical disks, customers can leverage the new virtual machines resources with such virtualization solution from Microsoft as Virtual PC or Hyper-V. “The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online. Disk2vhd uses Windows' 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),” Microsoft explained.
In addition to the introduction of Disk2vhd 1.6, Microsoft also release ADExplorer v1.41. “This release fixes a bug with searching from the root of a directory,” Metz added. For those not familiar with this tool, AD Explorer stands for Active Directory Explorer, and as the label implies, offers nothing more than an Active Directory (AD) with viewing and editing capabilities.
The Windows Sysinternals suite is available for download here.