Monday, October 1, 2012

More love for VHDtool

Finally got around to making my VHDtool very useful indeed for folks struggling with the VHD image format.

With Hyper-V, generated VHD images could of course be used either with the emulated IDE disks, or with the virtual SCSI adapter. However, if the created disk size is < 127GiB, you have to be careful with the actual size. If the size implied by the specification-mandated C/H/S calculations doesn't match the created disk size, you will run into problems when:

1) Partitioning a VHD on SCSI, then moving it onto IDE.
2) Converting a raw image into a VHD, and using it on IDE.

The problems will manifest themselves as the disk appearing smaller than it was created, and partitions may be corrupted (and VMs unbootable ;-().

Now there is the '-c' option that will ensure that the created disk size never be smaller than desired when used with the emulated IDE adapter.

VHDtool is a *nix utility for creating fixed and dynamic VHD images, and for converting from raw to fixed VHDs. Support for converting to dynamic VHD images will come soon.

In other news, I'll soon be putting out a tool to correct certain VMDK corruptions, that prevent a virtual disk from being attached to at least try file system recovery tools.

A

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