More on VHD files

I’ve had plenty to say about the uses of VHD files on different occasions. They get used anywhere we need to have a file which contains an image of a disk. So from Vista onwards we have had complete image backup to VHD, we use VHD for holding the virtual disk to be used by a Virtual Machine (be it hyper-V , Virtual PC or Virtual Server – the disks are portable although the OS on them might be configured to be bootable on one form of virtualization and not another), and so on.

Most interesting of all with Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 the OS can be boot from a VHD file – if you try to do this with an older OS it will begin to boot and then when it discovers it is not on a native hard disk it all goes the way of the pear. However an older OS can be installed on the “native” disk with a newer OS in a VHD, provided that the boot loader is new enough to understand boot from VHD. I’ve done this with my two cluster node laptops – I can boot into Server 2008 “classic” or into 2008 R2: the latter is contained in a VHD and so I don’t have to worry about re-partitioning the disk or having different OSes in different folders. The principles are the same but the process is a bit complicated for XP and for Server 2003 – but Mark has a guest post on his blog which gives a step by step guide. In theory it should work on any OS which uses NTLDR and Boot.ini all the way back to NT3.1 - though I will admit I’ve only run XP and Server 2003 in virtual machines since Hyper-V went into beta,

Of course being able to mount VHDs inside Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 gives you an alternative way of getting files back from a backup, and I’ve got a video on technet edge showing that and some of the other uses. My attempts to modify a backup VHD into a Virtual Machine VHD have failed – I can access the disk in a VM, but my attempts to find the right set of incantations to make it bootable have left me feeling like one of the less able students at Hogwarts. Into this mix comes a new Disk2VHD  tool from Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell – Mark is the more famous member of the team, but if you do a search on Bryce’s name you’ll see his background with sysinternals  so Disk2VHD comes with an instant provenance. There are multiple places where this tool has a use, lifting an existing Machine to make a boot-from-VHD image or a virtual machine, or as a way of doing an image backup which can be used in a VM.