Dugie just pointed this out.  There are two new trial VHDs available: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007 SP1 These trials are built for Virtual Server, but can be used with Virtual PC.  Dugie is also maintaining an unofficial list of all trial virtua...

Lighter posting this weekend.  I’m cleaning up the back yard for Spring and other assorted house-cleaning chores I’ve been putting off for a while. Michael Pietroforte at his awesome 4sysops blog has one of the best sysadmin sites I just can’t wait to see a new post from. Michael’s skil...

Mike Kolitz has just released "WIM2VHD".  This is a tool that allows you to take the WIM file off of a Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 install DVD and turn it directly into a virtual hard disk that can be used by Hyper-V, Virtual Server or Virtual PC.  Not only is this handy ...

Lots of stuff going on with Windows 7 this week.  Fortunately it has been concentrated in a few key areas: SKU’s for Windows 7 and more back-n-forth action with UAC than we say during this year’s Super Bowl. How well does Windows 7 handle 512MB? - Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report.  “Very...

In Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 VHD support is now part of the platform.  This means that you do not need to enable Hyper-V to mount and manipulate virtual hard disks.  You can mount virtual hard disks directly on your Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 system in two ways.  The ...

Yes, I know that Windows 7 Beta got released last week. I had tried valiantly this past Friday to get my W7 Beta key and W7 ISO downloads. The key was a complete wash until Saturday when the floodgates opened and I was able to get several along with a quick download of the ISO file. I had been worri...

People occasionally contact me and ask me how to fix a virtual hard disk that they have which is reporting corruption.  The short answer is: "Run data recovery tools inside the virtual machine." For the long answer we need to look at how the virtual hard disk is structured.  Reading from t...

If you have ever created a fixed-size virtual hard disk that was larger than, oh - 2GB, you probably noticed that it takes quite a while to create.  The reason why this takes so long is that when we create a new fixed-size virtual hard disk we take the time to explicitly zero-out all of the dis...

If you wish to access the contents of a VHD file without having to run Virtual PC or Virtual Server, you can do so by using PowerShell and running a couple of commands from the command line....

I use Virtual PC quite a bit for checking out various operating systems. sometimes I have files on a virtual OS that I need to use on my real system. This usually means that I have to fire up Virtual PC and run the desired operating system. Windows 7 allows you to attach VHD files so that you can ac...