Yet another Sysinternals tool that I couldn’t leave out: Disk2VHD (also available via WSCC or directly from here) clones your physical system partitions into a virtual hard
disk file (VHD) for use in Windows Virtual PC or to boot
from natively (VHD boot is only supported in Windows 7 Enterprise in Ultimate, though). This is fantastic for evaluating software or for moving over to
a new system: you can basically save your entire Windows OS, including all programs, settings and data, move to a system and still boot up your old
Windows inside a virtual environment – just in case you forgot something! Beware: Disk2Vhd doesn’t support partitions larger than 127 GB and it
also clones your entire partition record (including its partition signature), so you might run into issues if you’re trying to mount the cloned “.vhd” file
with the system you created it in the first place.
