Virtual PC Hard Disk spanning multiple files?

Question

I've spent the past few hours searching, but can't seem to find the answer. Hopefully somebody here knows.

I want to use Virtual PC 2007 to create a virtual machine, but I'd like the hard disk for the VM to be on a USB hard drive. I'm not worried about the performance of the VM, I'd just like the VM to be off of my primary hard drive. The issue is that the USB hard drive is FAT32 formatted and I'd prefer to keep it that way. In VMWare it's possible to have the hard disk "chunked" out into 2 GB files so it fits on the host hard drive. Is it possible in VPC to do the something similar?

Answer 1

"Versions prior to Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 supported splitting of disk images, if the disk image grew larger than the maximum supported file size on the host file system.

Some file systems, such as the FAT32 file system, have a 4-GB limit on file size. If the hard disk image expands more than 4 GB, Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 and previous versions will split the hard disk image into another file. The split files do not have any headers or footers, just raw data. The last split file has the footer stored at the end of the file. The first file in the split disk image has an extension of .vhd. The following split files use the .v01, .v02, … filename extension. The split files will be in the same directory as the main hard disk image. The maximum number of split files that can be present is 64.The size of the split file cannot be altered."

http://www.wirwar.com/blog/2007/10/26/splitting-a-virtual-pc-vhd/