Physical to Virtual using SysInternals Disk2VHD

The hard drive controller was regularly failing on my source control server. What to do? The server was due for an upgrade soon as its hardware was more or less obsolete and the performance was less than satisfactory. While the controller was still mostly working, I used SysInternals Disk2VHD to create a virtual copy of the physical server. In the interim while waiting on the new Hyper-V server to permanently place it on, I can temporarily run the server in VirtualPC 2007 and with three times more RAM than was available on the physical server.

The process was simple, fast, and seamless. I just had to re-activate the OS after the conversion. Just make sure you activate it before the expiration date which I believe was only 3 days on my copy or it will brick your ability to manage the server from the terminal.

While waiting for copying and converting processes to finish I ran across a few related posts that I thought I might want to reference in the future.

• Are VHD's Compatible between Hyper-V and Virtual Server and Virtual PC
• Vittorio Pavesi's post to Convert VHD from Hyper-V to Virtual PC which describes how to overcome the compatibility limitation that prevents using a Hyper-V created VHD in Virtual PC.