Dugie’s Pensieve

A:  Yes, you can use your iPod as storage, to store and run a VHD.  But more on that in just a minute.

Uh-huh, using your Ipod as an external HDD for VHD storage.  How cool is that?!  When I saw Leon’s post about this, it made me chuckle controllably.  So much in fact, I might even go and buy and iPod just to try this!  The only catch is, the iPOD only supports FAT32 as storage.  So if you have a VHD over 4Gb in size, you’ll need workarounds — and the reason for this repost.

Anyway, to copy a larger VHD on FAT32, you will need to split it into smaller chunks.  For the full story read Leon’s post "Splitting a VHD", and a heavily edited snippet is below:

…..We just had to find a way to split the VHD into several smaller chunks (each less than 4GB).

I got bold and downloaded a copy of the official VHD specs from Microsoft. Maybe I could hack together a little tool that would do the job. The only information I could find about splitted VHD’s was this:  The split files do not have any headers or footers, just raw data. The last split file has the footer stored at the end of the file. The first file in the split disk image has an extension of .vhd. The following split files use the .v01, .v02, … filename extension. The split files will be in the same directory as the main hard disk image. The maximum number of split files that can be present is 64

There it was! As it turns out a split VHD is nothing more than just a raw file splitting operation.

So I quickly downloaded a copy of the popular HJSplit file splitting utility and split the U2U VHD into several chunks, using a maximum chunk size of 3.5GB (I could have used a larger chunk size, but I wanted to be on the safe side). I then renamed the chunks, so they matched the pattern required by Virtual PC (i.e. U2U.vhd, U2U.v01, U2U.v02, U2U.v03, …). I copied the chunks to the iPod and created a new Virtual PC instance (.vmc), that used the newly, splitted, VHD. And guess what… It worked! I experimented with several other chunk sizes and it doesn’t really seem to matter what chunk size you choose.

ROFL!  That’s priceless.  Leon, I love your style.