vhd

Expanding Virtual Disk

Hey everyone, I'm using Virtual PC and working with a virtual hard disk (*.vhd) that is only sized at 8.2 GB. I would like to double the size to something like 16-20GB. I see options for compacting the VHD but nothing to expand it. It's set to "dynamically expand" but I'm installing some software and it doesn't seem to resize itself to a...

Defrag a virtual hard disk (.vhd) ?

Like any other hard disk, virtual hard discs (*.vhd) will suffer from fragmentation. So to keep good performance i guess i have to defrag first the virtual hard disc from within the virtual machine and also the (physical) hard disc the .vhd is stored on. First, are these assumption correct? And second, is there a way to defrag both (v...

Is it possible to have "Differencing Disks" in Windows 7 VHD?

I have used wim2vhd to make a vhd file to boot from. I'm planning more vhd machines based on the same OS(windows 7 ultimate) Can I have one "Master-VHD" witch contain the os, and smaler "Child-VHD"'s that inherit from the master? Or is this not possible in this scenario? HW OS : Windows 7 Ultimate (6.1.7600 Build: 7600 ) ...

Programmatically attaching a VHD to a remote Hyper-V VM

Using Hyper-V Manager, I can connect to a remote VM host, go to the settings of a VM, and add an existing .VHD file as a new hard disk. If the VM host is running Server 2008 R2, and the disk is being attached to a SCSI controller, I can even do this while the VM is running (see What's new in Hyper-V R2). Doing this manually, everything ...

NTFS-compressing Virtual PC disks (on host and/or guest)

I'm hoping someone here can answer these definitively: Does putting a VHD file in an NTFS-compressed folder on the host improve performance of the virtual machine, diminish performance, or neither? What about using NTFS compression within the guest? Does using compresssion on either the host or the guest lead to any problems like read ...

Evaluating IIS7 with Virtual PC?

Hi, I wanna do some local developer tests of IIS 7 but I don't have Windows Vista, 7 or 2008 server - I currently run XP SP3. I have Virtual PC installed so I can use Microsoft's IE compatibility images - are there any time-limited images that I can use with Virtual PC so I can check out IIS 7? The IIS 7 "Try it" link points to this p...

What is a faster way to backup and restore a MySQL DB than mysqldump? (faster than 4 hours)

We have a database that is about 3GB (in text) after mysqldump is used to dump a text representation of it, and then mysql < mysqlstatement.sql is used to restore the database. But it takes 4 hours. Is there a way to quickly back up / restore the database instead? It is on a Mac using Ruby on Rails, so one time I set the test en...

Write custom boot loader to .vhd file

I have a custom boot loader that I would like to write to a .VHD file for testing. Any idea at what offset in the file I should write the boot loader to? Any pointers to the C structures for the .VHD file format? ...

Importing a VHD into Parallels Desktop 6 on the Mac

I've looked everywhere for this but can't find an answer, so: I have a VHD image created for me by a client -- he installed Win7 on a machine and then used a tool from SysInternals to create a VHD which he shared with me and a colleague. I can mount the VHD on my Mac using Parallels Mounter and see the contents, but I can't for the l...