I have done copy and paste but I think that is not possible to lose this post for the content... read and think!

 

Backup, convert, flexibility and so on wow....

 

The Windows Sysinternals team as brought out a new utility, called Disk2vhd 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. The cool thing about Disk2vhd 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).

 

Go to http://www.sysinternals.com and try it

 

cheers

 

 

Alex

 

This VHD release is available in English only and is for evaluation and testing purposes. Evaluating Windows Server2008 software does not require product activation or entering a product key. Any edition of Windows Server 2008 may be installed without activation and evaluated for an initial 60 days.

 

At this Microsoft web page there are all requirements and link to download Server 2008 for Hyper-V.