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-- Ben Armstrong, Virtualization Program Manager

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New WinImage Beta with support for editing VHD's

MSDN Blogs > Virtual PC Guy's Blog > New WinImage Beta with support for editing VHD's

New WinImage Beta with support for editing VHD's

25 Jul 2005 8:15 PM
  • Comments 4

A new beta of WinImage has been released with support for viewing and editing virtual hard disks from Virtual PC and Virtual Server.  You can download a copy of the beta from here:

http://www.winimage.com/beta.htm

Personally - I am really happy to see this - as I have always liked using WinImage for my virtual floppy disks and now I can use this tool for virtual hard disks too.  Using this beta you can:

  1. Copy files out of a virtual hard disk without booting up the virtual machine (if it is FAT, FAT32 or NTFS formatted)
  2. Copy files into a virtual hard disk without booting up the virtual machine (if it is FAT or FAT32 formatted)

Note that this is a beta release - so it is advisable to backup your .VHDs before playing around with it.

Cheers,
Ben

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Comments
  • Andrew Dugdell
    26 Jul 2005 2:31 AM
    Now that is very good news. That will be going straight into my list of top 10 tools!
  • wacko
    29 Jul 2005 5:40 AM
    ben,

    How does someone make a tool like that ? is there some way they can get access to the VHD drives through some interop or something ?
  • Candle
    31 Jul 2005 3:44 PM
    Really useful.

    Virtual PC images are very wasteful of space, especially if delta's are used, so it is often impractical not to have NTFS compression on.

    This means adapting something like the GPL'd 'VMware's Back' virtual disk driver to mount them isn't that helpful, as it won't read compressed NTFS images.

    This WinImage support gets around that, by providing it's own NTFS / FAT reading code rather than relying on the OS.



  • 1 Aug 2005 4:59 PM
    Wacko,

    Microsoft recently started licensing the format for our virtual hard disks to interested developers to enable them to build solutions just like this. If you want to find out more you can email vhdlic@microsoft.com

    Cheers,
    Ben
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