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Disk to VHD – Convert Physical Disk to VHD

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How to convert a physical disk to virtual VHD without losing data? Do you know how to convert VHD to physical disk? You can find detailed method to do the conversion between physical disk and VHD.

Disk to VHD

You must have heard much
about virtualization. Virtual machines gain great popularity these days, which
should owe to their ability to make managing computer instances so easy and
convenient. With features like inherent portability and snapshot, users prefer
virtual machines when it comes to testing and speed of scale.

If you’ve tried virtual
machines, you might have learned virtual machine or virtual disk is not in one
unified format. The most commonly used virtual disk types are VHD/VHDX, VMDK,
VDI, etc. Have you ever wanted to convert disk formats such as convert VHD to
physical, convert physical disk to virtual, convert disk between VHD and VMDK,
etc. In fact, it is easy to do disk converting among physical disk, VHD, VMDK
and VDI, for example, convert physical VHD or VHD to physical. If you are look
for a how-to guide to convert disk, then continue reading this article.

Physical to virtual converter

In this section you can find
two physical to virtual converters which can help you convert physical hard
drive to virtual disk. The converting process will be discussed in next section.

Disk2vhd, provided by Microsoft,
is able to create VHD versions of physical disk for use in Microsoft Virtual OC
or Microsoft Hyper-V. It makes use of Windows volume Snapshot feature and created
consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes to be converted.

DiskGenius is an all-featured
tool for data recovery, disk partition, data backup and disk utilities. It provides
excellent support for VHD, VMDK and VDI virtual disk. With this tool, you can
create or load virtual disk, recover data from virtual disk, manage space on
virtual disk, convert virtual disk format, convert virtual disk to physical or convert physical to
virtual disk.

How to convert physical disk to VHD?

In this part, we are going to
use DiskGenius to convert a physical disk to VHD. DiskGenius can do a
sector-level copy of disk during converting if necessary for example converting
encrypted volume, so that the converted virtual disk can be identical to
original drive

Step
1: Install
and launch DiskGenius from your computer. Then create a VHD disk with this
software: click Disk Menu and choose
Create New Virtual Disk File and Create Virtual PC Virtual Disk File. Then
you can name the VHD file and set a location to store it on your computer.

Step 2: Once the VHD is created, you can view it in DiskGenius. This newly created disk does not have any partition, and you need to partition it: select the VHD disk and click Quick Partition button from toolbar.

Step
3: Clone
physical disk to VHD.

In DiskGenius, click …

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Why Digital Decluttering Can Do Wonders For Your Devices

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Digital decluttering is important. It’s as important as decluttering your physical space. Holding on to all those unused apps, nonsense emails, redundant photos, useless files will just slow down your devices. At some point, digital decluttering is what you have to do to save your devices like smartphone, computer, and tablet.

The first thing you want to do, is delete anything you don’t need on your phone. Like the 10 pictures you got of the same image, delete the extras. Or the applications you never use, get rid of those. It is the same with your computer, but with this, there may be programs you are unaware of that take up space like a temporary start-up program. On a Windows computer, you can run a disk clean-up to get rid of files that are no longer of any use. It’s always good to have some sort of an external hard drive or pay for a subscription to a cloud storage service.

(Via: https://whotv.com/2019/02/25/digital-decluttering-to-speed-up-your-devices/)

You probably have a thousand and one photos in the gallery of your smartphone and those are just the ones you took with your camera. You haven’t even counted the Viber images and videos. Add to that the many downloads and screenshots you never bother to trash. Now, that’s a lot of stuff in your smartphone.

The same thing with your computer. You probably have a million files in it. That’s why it’s time for some serious digital decluttering.

“There are like I-cloud, for example with iPhones, Google Drive has a bunch of popular services that allow you to save that stuff directly onto the internet essentially, which is good because it’s cheaper to go about having it stored online most of the time it’s like a monthly subscription rather than the part itself.”

(Via: https://whotv.com/2019/02/25/digital-decluttering-to-speed-up-your-devices/)

Online backup is not bad at all. It’s actually very convenient. The best thing about it is that it’s very easy to access files. Since all your files are backed up online, you can access your files from any computer or smartphone. All you need is a secure internet to access all your files.

You can choose a backup service that automatically transfers all your files online. You won’t even have to think about it because once your computer or smartphone is connected to the internet, your files are automatically transmitted. The thing you need to remember about some online backup services is that it does not really declutter your computer or smartphone. Basically, it just backs up everything on your computer or smartphone. It doesn’t really clean it up. You would have to keep all your files on your computer for them to be backed up online.

That’s the advantage of using external hard drives. Once you’ve backed up your files to an external hard drive, you can start decluttering your computer and smartphone. You can delete as …

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Aspects of Grey Market Products

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“Grey Marketing” is a business arbitrage which a low cost source of products is used to extract profits. In short, buy the same product cheaper and sell it for the same price. It works best for branded products that are sold at different prices in different markets. There are four aspects of gray marketing of […]

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Do You Have A Security Strategy To Protect Your Backups?

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It’s not enough to back up data. That doesn’t necessarily guarantee total protection. Even if backups are hidden away in the network, you should never eliminate the thought of losing data.

The question you should ask yourself is this. Is the network safe enough to protect backups? If you think it is, then good for you. Still, that shouldn’t stop you from creating a security strategy to protect backups.

One sure way to avoid total data loss is to protect the network itself. With advanced persistent threats continuously progressing, no network is safe. That is scary.

Ransomware is one of the advanced persistent threats to networks these days. It stays quiet and undetected within the network. Eventually it steals data so that the ransom writer can sell it back to the owner. It’s simple extortion that could put any company out of business in no time.

There has been a tactical pivot in ransomware. It seems that ransomware writers have realized that large organizations have lots of money, and some do not have the best protection against infections. Newer ransomware is behaving as an advanced persistent threat, a piece of malware that tries to stay undetected in your network for some time to do the maximum amount of damage.

The APT will usually spread through your network, infecting as many computers as possible. Often, the malware will try to connect to a command-and-control server over the internet to report the progress of the infection and await the command to attack.

(Via: https://searchdatabackup.techtarget.com/tip/How-to-protect-backups-from-ransomware-infiltration)

Unfortunately, these days the use of command and control or C &C server is evolving to do more damage to the network. It stays silent and undetected in the background so that it could have access to the network for a very long time, eventually endangering computers and backups.

A ransomware APT attack may start by stealthily spreading itself through your network and infecting all of your computers. It will then seek out file-based backups and valuable but older files to encrypt. The aim is to get as much of your infrastructure infected and encrypted — over a period of weeks or months — before you are alerted and can protect backups from ransomware. By slowly encrypting files, the ransomware is making the process of recovering from backups slow and expensive, perhaps more costly than paying the ransom. Once the infection is complete, and your backups contain a mix of encrypted and clean files, then it is time to detonate the ransomware. All of the infected machines will suddenly encrypt recently used files, and your applications will stop working.

Because the APT ransomware has been in the network for weeks before it detonates, it probably has been backed up numerous times. Your backups now contain both encrypted files and the ransomware application itself.

(Via: https://searchdatabackup.techtarget.com/tip/How-to-protect-backups-from-ransomware-infiltration)

That’s where the danger lies. Restoring backups could mean restoring ransomware …

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