Search results for 'app:weblogs' matching tag 'Windows Server 2008 R2 Mount VHD'

Hyper-V: Disk2vhd Free Physical Disk Conversion tool

jeffl — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Well dual boot just went obsolete. At least installing to two different directories it did. Now you can achieve true isolation. Mark Rusinovich wizard extraordinaire and the Microsoft Sysinternals team launched a great new tool. Disk2VHD excerpted from the Sysinternals site:

Download Disk2vhd (704 KB)

Introduction

Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). 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).

The Disk2vhd user interface lists the volumes present on the system:

It will create one VHD for each disk on which selected volumes reside. It preserves the partitioning information of the disk, but only copies the data contents for volumes on the disk that are selected. This enables you to capture just system volumes and exclude data volumes, for example.

Note: Virtual PC supports a maximum virtual disk size of 127GB. If you create a VHD from a larger disk it will not be accessible from a Virtual PC VM.

To use VHDs produced by Disk2vhd, create a VM with the desired characteristics and add the VHDs to the VM’s configuration as IDE disks. On first boot, a VM booting a captured copy of Windows will detect the VM’s hardware and automatically install drivers, if present in the image. If the required drivers are not present, install them via the Virtual PC or Hyper-V integration components. You can also attach to VHDs using the Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 Disk Management or Diskpart utilities.

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.

Disk2vhd runs Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, and higher, including x64 systems.

Thanks Dieter Rauscher for the heads up,

Jeff Loucks
Available Technology

Hyper-V: Disk2vhd Free Physical Disk Conversion tool

jeffl — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Download Disk2vhd (704 KB)

Introduction

The Disk2vhd user interface lists the volumes present on the system:

Note: Virtual PC supports a maximum virtual disk size of 127GB. If you create a VHD from a larger disk it will not be accessible from a Virtual PC VM.

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.

Disk2vhd runs Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, and higher, including x64 systems.

Thanks Dieter Rauscher for the heads up,

Jeff Loucks
Available Technology

Hyper-V 2008 R2 - Gotcha #1 - How to install Windows Server 2003 SP2 without a network card

jeffl — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Well I am deep into using Hyper-V R2 and I have probably forgotten a dozen things that caught me off guard at the beginning. I have resolved to just blog about them as they come up rather that put them in order of importance.

In order for Hyper-V 2008 R2 Integration services to be installed on Windows Server 2003, SP2 needs to be installed. Now in most circustances this would not be a problem because you could use slipstreamimng to make another ISO image with the SP2 or SP3 install files. For more information on slip streamimng look here: How to integrate software updates into your Windows installation source files.

Having said that, there are instances were you can't slip stream media because of deeper integrations. Just one such case is with SBS 2003 R2. It so happened that I was creating an SBS 2003 VM when I hit this snag. It is one of those catch 22 situations. The network card does not work because integrations services are not installed but you can't install integrations services without SP2 installed and you can't get SP2 on to the VM because you don't have a network connection yet.

So I started thinking through how to get SP2 on the box. My first two thoughts were Pass-Through Disk or Build an ISO. I quckly abandoned those. I started downloading SP2 while I was thinking and that is when VHD support in Wndows 2008 R2 came to mind. Before the download had completed I shutdown the VM with the partially installed SBS 2003. The following is a step by step of how to mount a VHD as a drive in Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2.

Task 1: Attach VHD as Drive on Parent Partition

Click Start > Rick Click on Computer
Select Manage from the right click context menu
Select Storage
Right click Disk Management
Select Attach VHD from the right click context menu
Browse or type the location of your VHD file (In my case it was the OS drive for SBS 2003)
Click OK. Assign a drive Letter (I will assume you selected V: for the rest of the description)
You have now mounted the VHD file as a hard drive and can access it like a regular drive.

Task 2: Add Windows 2003 SP2 to the drive

Right click on the Windows 2003 SP2 installer file you downloaded earlier
Select Send to > V: (V: being the drive letter you assinged to the VHD file)
You have now copied the file to the VHD file on you. You can vaerify this by using Windows Explorer.

Task 3: Dettach the VHD from the Parent

1. Click Start > Rick Click on Computer
2. Select Manage from the right click context menu
3. Select Storage
4. Click Disk Management
5. Right click on Drive V:
6. Select Dettach VHD from the right click context menu
7. You have now detached the VHD file as a hard drive and can start the VM again.

Task 4: Restart SBS 2003 R2 Child Partition and install SP2

Start your Child Partion
After you have logged on
Open windows Explorer and go to the c: drive
Double click the Windows 2003 SP2 installer.
After the installer complete and you have completed the required restarts, insert the Integration Services disk
Once the integration services complete the network card will find its drivers.

So finally I could complete the install of SBS 2003 R2 on Hyper-V 2008 R2.

Hope that helps,

Jeff Loucks
Available Technology