Nixadmins.net

I got a new HP Z400 Workstation to my office today and decided to recycle the old DC5800 to someone who needs a trusty workhorse and doesn’t work with memory intensive tasks like Virtual Systems like I do. Even if my old desktop was getting a new life I still wanted to keep it because I’ve installed many tools on it I still use and I like to do some Group policy testing on it.

I found the great tool Disk2VHD by Sysinternals. It converts your physical disk to a VHD file so you can use it in Virtual PC or some other virtualization software that supports Microsoft’s VHD format. Disk2VHD homepage http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx

Before you start this you may want to make a backup of your VHD file in case something goes wrong.

Shrinking the VHD for Virtual PC

So I captured my old hard drive and moved it to my new workstation. The file was only 80Gb as Disk2VHD makes it a dynamically expanding disk. Everything looks fine so far. The problem is that Virtual PC only supports 127Gb drives or smaller and my physical drive was 250Gb so booting the drive in Virtual PC didn’t work. I had to get it resized to under 127Gb to get it booting. Googling around I found a few tools but none of them worked the way I needed them to. I had to get my drive size under 127Gb. Some researching later I found that the computer management console, disk management, in Windows 7 was able to mount and shrink my VHD. So fingers crossed I started compmgmt.msc and mounted the drive.

Right clicking on Disk Management and selecting attach Virtual Hard disk worked like a charm. So now let’s shrink the drive. Select your drive from the list and right click selecting Shrink.

After the query is done it will tell you how much it will be able to shrink the volume. If it’s still over 127Gb you can activate the drive in Computer Management and go delete some files. I had a lot of downloaded files I had to delete before I could get it to shrink under 127Gb. When the shrink operation is done we still have to shrink the vhd file. This just made our Windows partition smaller and now we want to get rid of the unused partition from the VHD file to get it under the magic 127Gb line.

VHDResizer to the rescue

All you need to do now is get the software vhdresizer and have it resize your vhd. You can get VHDResizer from http://vmtoolkit.com/files/folders/converters/entry87.aspx

Still no roses

I was hoping this would be the end of the journey and I would be able to boot the system. You could try it at this point but for some reason my system wont boot. I booted into the XP setup and ran FIXBOOT and FIXMBR and the system still won’t boot. So next I tried an Repair install. Victory!

The repair install fixed any issues but I’m tempted to go trough the same again to check where this really fails. I’m sure you can do this without the repair install.

But the result is the same, I have my old desktop OS back and can use the tools when I need to and I didn’t have to reinstall from scratch. If anyone else has had the same problems and solved them without repair install I would be curious to know what you did.