Dugie’s Pensieve

The lads over at vmToolkit (that delivered the fabulous Vmdk2Vhd) have come though with another fine tool: VhdExpand.  A snippet from the official announcement is below:

VhdExpand will expand Microsoft’s VHD format files and will also convert between Fixed and Dynamic file types. This is a sector by sector copy operation from one size/type to the other and the source file remains unaltered.

I’ve run a few tests on various VHDs and here are my first impressions:

• Nice.
• Resized a 64 Gb dynamic VHD to a dynamic 78 Gb VHD, straight foward, took about 10 minutes
• Interestingly enough the original VHD was 17.9 Gb in physical size and the new VHD file 12.7 Gb
• There new resized VHD had (as expected) the addition unallocated space
• Mounting the new VHD with VHDmount and running ‘diskpart + extend’ worked a treat
• Powered up the VM and new VHD and everything is humming along

Thanks again to everyone over at VMtoolkit for another fine tool for the collection.