Creating a Differencing Hard Disk
Follow these steps to create a differencing disk:

1. Click Start Administrative Tools Hyper-V Manager.
2. In Hyper-V Manager, on the Actions pane, click New Hard Disk.
3. In the New Virtual Hard Disk Wizard, click Next on the Before You Begin page.
4. On the Choose Disk Type page, select Differencing and click Next.
5. On the Specify Name and Location page, enter the new name of the child disk (for example, child-disk.vhd). You can also modify the default location of the new VHD
￿le if you want. Click Next to continue.

6. Next, on the Con￿gure Disk page, you need to specify the parent VHD ￿le. This will be the basis for your differencing disk. For example, a complete installation of Win- dows Server 2008 is a good parent. Click Next to continue.

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EXERCISE 8.3 (continued)

7. On the Completing the New Virtual Hard Disk Wizard page, verify that all settings are correct and click Finish to create the hard disk.

Exercise 8.4 will show you how to create a ￿xed disk based on a local hard drive. Please remember that only ￿xed size or dynamically expanding disks can be used to clone a local hard drive during creation.

EXERCISE 8.4

Creating a Fixed Size Disk and Cloning a Local Drive
Follow these steps to create a ￿xed hard disk and migrate a physical disk to it:

1. Click Start Administrative Tools Hyper-V Manager.
2. In Hyper-V Manager, on the Actions pane, click New Hard Disk.
3. In the New Virtual Hard Disk Wizard, click Next on the Before You Begin page.
4. On the Choose Disk Type page, select Fixed Size and click Next.
5. On the Specify Name and Location page, enter the new name of the virtual hard disk (for example, clone.vhd). You can also modify the default location of the new VHD ￿le
if you want. Click Next to continue.

Hyper-V Installation and Configuration

333

EXERCISE 8.4 (continued)

6. Next, on the Con￿gure Disk page, you can decide if you want to create a blank vir- tual hard disk with a speci￿ed size or if you want to copy the contents of a hard disk to the virtual disk. For this exercise, select Copy the Contents of the Speci￿ed Physi- cal Disk and select a physical drive on which to copy to the virtual disk. Then click Next to continue.

7. On the Completing the New Virtual Hard Disk Wizard page, verify that all settings are correct and click Finish to create the virtual hard disk and start the copy process.

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Because the process to copy a physical drive to a virtual disk is just a normal copy process, you should allow enough time to complete it. The time varies depending on the size of your physical disk.

The process to add a physical or pass-through disk to a virtual machine is quite different. For this, you ￿rst need to create the virtual machine, and then you open the Virtual Machine Settings to con￿gure the physical disk. If you did not yet create a virtual machine in Hyper-V Manager, you should complete Exercise 8.6 to create one and come back to this section.
If you want to add a physical disk to a virtual machine, the physical disk must be set as Of￿ine in Disk Management, as shown in Figure 8.8.