The hidden treasures of Sysinternals

Every few months I make a pilgrimage to the Sysinternals website to look at its superb collection of tools. It’s now hosted inside the Microsoft Technet monster since its authors joined Microsoft as employees some while ago, but the value of their site is still as strong as ever and the tools are now guaranteed not to be ignored or left to rust.

So what’s new there? Well, there’s a tool called Disk2vhd, which creates VHDs (virtual hard disks, Microsoft’s VM disk format) from physical drives. You can then use these within Virtual PC or the server-side Hyper-V engine. What’s important about Disk2vhd is that you can even run it on a disk that’s actually in use at the time, which is like pulling yourself up by your own boot laces.

It can do this because it uses the Windows Volume Snapshot technology to take an instant snapshot of the disk on which to do its work, even while the disk continues to be written and read by other programs.