Copying a VHD to a physical disk

Question

I've seen a lot of guides on how to do physical -> VHD, but is there any way to easily move a VHD image to a physical disk easily? Or should I just attach the disk and go to town with GNU DD?

Answer 1

The dd approach works, but only if the destination physical disk can be trashed and entirely overwritten, and is at least as big as the maximum growth size of the virtual disk. This can also end up taking a long time if the virtual disk isn't "full".

An alternative approach is to use an imaging tool like Ghost or ImageX to efficiently capture the file contents of the virtual disk's partitions into some sort of extractable archive files and then extract their contents onto a partitioned physical disk.

Answer 2

An alternative approach is to use an imaging tool like Ghost or ImageX to efficiently capture...as described above, I use Acronis True Image Home. Boot the VM with the (Acronis vCD ISO) and create ".TIB" Image, then boot the Phys box with the CD and Recover the ".TIB" Image to the Phys HD using Sector-by-sector. This supports the Recovery of multiple Partitions from the same Image.