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From: Peter D. J�rgensen on 20 Jan 2010 03:25

"Bo Berglund" wrote
> Today I used both disk2vhd and VMWare Converter 4 to test P2V on a
> physical (HP) workstation with a 160 Gb drive. Only 32 Gb of tha is
> actually used.
....
> Tomorrow I will try and start up these machines in VPC2007-SP1 (the
> VHD)

I doubt it will work, as the documentation describes:
"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."

But I have a 160gb WinXP laptop I would like to virtualize before installing
Win7, so I'm looking forward to your report :-)

/Peter


From: Bo Berglund on 20 Jan 2010 04:15
On Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:25:11 +0100, "Peter D. J�rgensen"
<pdj1974(a)hotKILLSPAMMERSmail.com> wrote:

>
>"Bo Berglund" wrote
>> Today I used both disk2vhd and VMWare Converter 4 to test P2V on a
>> physical (HP) workstation with a 160 Gb drive. Only 32 Gb of tha is
>> actually used.
>...
>> Tomorrow I will try and start up these machines in VPC2007-SP1 (the
>> VHD)
>
>I doubt it will work, as the documentation describes:
>"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."
>
>But I have a 160gb WinXP laptop I would like to virtualize before installing
>Win7, so I'm looking forward to your report :-)
>
>/Peter
>
First report:

1) Disk2Vhd
As I noted before disk2vhd did not offer an option to reduce the size
of the target disk below the 128 Gb allowed by VPC2007.
So the resulting VHD file has a disk size of 160 Gb just like the
source disk even though the used part of that disk is just 32 Gb. :-(
When I tried it on a VPC guest it was recognized as 128 Gb and
corrupted....
I also tried to create a new virtual machine with a 100 Gb empty drive
where I attached the converted VHD as disk 2. Then I booted it off my
ISO version of the Acronis boot CD in order to try and clone the
converted disk onto the smaller disk. But that failed too because
Acronis saw the source disk as corrupt (and size 128 Gb).
Intersetingly the VHD is perfectly OK, I can view it in WinImage and I
see all the data there.
So I tried VhdResizer, which has been mentioned here before. But this
tool does not give an option to make the disk smaller, only bigger!
So I'd say that this type of P2V into VPC2007 is doomed unless someone
can point to a tool that will actually resize a VHD properly both ways
(up and down)!

2) VMWare Converter 4
Unlike the Microsoft solution, this worked right away! I just attached
the created virtual machine to my VMWare Workstation 7 and fired it up
successfully.
Before I did so I changed networking to be "host only" so the guest
would not appear on the network. The reason for this is that the
source PC is still on the network and is a domain attached PC so if I
allow the clone to also appear it will cause grief in Active
Directory.
But as a side effect of this the guest is not on line to the Internet
and when it starts up it requires activation, which is not possible
right now. So I had to shut it down. Will activate tonight when I am
back home and can let it reach the internet without problems with AD
at work.

Conclusions
My advice is to switch from Microsoft VPC2007 into VMWare Workstation
7 (at a price) or Player 3 (free offering) and use their converter for
the P2V. The result is a working guest which also has full USB and
DirectXX graphics support.

The only possibility to use VPC2007 and the disk2vhd tool is to first
use a partitioning tool on the source machine to make the source
partition smaller than 128 Gb.
Or alternately if someone here can suggest a method/tool that can be
used on a VHD that is too big but contains small amounts of data to
shrink the disk partition size.

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)
From: Bo Berglund on 20 Jan 2010 09:34
Is there anyone reading this thread that has a suggestion for how one
can shrink a VHD image that was created by disk2vhd from a drive that
was > 130 Gb but contains less data than 130 Gb?

I have checked ways that do *not* work:

1) Use Acronis in a VPC2007 guest to clone the big disk onto a smaller
one. Does not work since the VPC2007 BIOS does not recognize the big
VHD drive at its true size. And Acronis is not smarter than BIOS....

2) Make an Acronis backup on the source PC and use this to restore
onto a smaller VHD in a guest. Does not work because now the HAL
adjustments are not made so the VHD is not bootable without
bluescreening (I don't have Universal Restore). And it is not handling
a disk2vhd image anyway.

3) Use VHDResizer from VMToolkit to reduce the size of the disk. Does
not work because it does not offer the option of *reducing* the size,
only to increase it.

What I have not tried yet is:

4) Use a VirtualServer 2005 guest and attach the big VHD as a SCSI
drive that does not have size limitations. Then use PartitionManager
or similar to reduce the partition size below 128 Gb.
Then when that is done use Acronis to clone the partition onto a new
VHD disk smaller than 128 Gb.
I guess this would work, but involves multiple time-consuming steps as
well as obtaining a commercial software package (PartitionMagic) just
for this single job.
But can the VHD be attached to a VS2005 guest as a SCSI drive in the
first place?

Is there some other method that can be used in situations like this?
--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)
From: Robert Comer on 20 Jan 2010 09:50
Possibilities:

1: Get universal restore, that's what I use.

2: Your virtual server idea should work well to boot in a partition
manager to copy and shrink the partition to a new <127G VHD. I don't
know if you can just shrink the partition on the existing VHD to be
under 127G and that would work, theoretically it could.

3: Don't know if this will work but it's easy, mount the VHD in Win7,
use computer management/disk management to shrink the partition to
<127G, unmount and try booting VPC from the VHD.

--
Bob Comer


On Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:34:21 +0100, Bo Berglund
<boberglund(a)myotherhome.sec> wrote:

>Is there anyone reading this thread that has a suggestion for how one
>can shrink a VHD image that was created by disk2vhd from a drive that
>was > 130 Gb but contains less data than 130 Gb?
>
>I have checked ways that do *not* work:
>
>1) Use Acronis in a VPC2007 guest to clone the big disk onto a smaller
>one. Does not work since the VPC2007 BIOS does not recognize the big
>VHD drive at its true size. And Acronis is not smarter than BIOS....
>
>2) Make an Acronis backup on the source PC and use this to restore
>onto a smaller VHD in a guest. Does not work because now the HAL
>adjustments are not made so the VHD is not bootable without
>bluescreening (I don't have Universal Restore). And it is not handling
>a disk2vhd image anyway.
>
>3) Use VHDResizer from VMToolkit to reduce the size of the disk. Does
>not work because it does not offer the option of *reducing* the size,
>only to increase it.
>
>What I have not tried yet is:
>
>4) Use a VirtualServer 2005 guest and attach the big VHD as a SCSI
>drive that does not have size limitations. Then use PartitionManager
>or similar to reduce the partition size below 128 Gb.
>Then when that is done use Acronis to clone the partition onto a new
>VHD disk smaller than 128 Gb.
>I guess this would work, but involves multiple time-consuming steps as
>well as obtaining a commercial software package (PartitionMagic) just
>for this single job.
>But can the VHD be attached to a VS2005 guest as a SCSI drive in the
>first place?
>
>Is there some other method that can be used in situations like this?
From: Christian Barmala on 20 Jan 2010 11:39
Hi Bo,

"Bo Berglund" <boberglund(a)myotherhome.sec> wrote:
> The disk2vhd has an option to "Fix up HAL for VirtualPC

Where is this option hidden? I didn't find any options at all? The command
line syntax is "disk2vhd <drive(s)> <VHD file>" and the GUI has in input
field for the VHD-file and checkboxes for the available drives. I didn't
even find a "version" command to check if I'm using an outdated version of
disk2vhd.

A colleague intends to
- shrink the physical disk with partition magic,
- boot from the Acronis CD and create an image of the shrunken partition,
- create an empty VM,
- boot the VM with the Acronis CD and
- restore from the Acronis tib-file

Yet another idea would be to convert the tib file into a vhd. The latest
Acronis version can do this.

Christian

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