How To Mount a Virtual Hard Drive Locally

September 03, 2006

Very nice Ben!

See below to discover how to mount a VHD by clicking it with Ben’s reg key.

Original source:

Double clicking on a VHD to mount it
Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Beta 2 includes 'vhdmount' - a tool to allow you to mount a virtual hard disk directly on your host operating system. While vhdmount is provided as a command line tool - a very small amount of work will allow you to mount VHDs by just double clicking on them. By creating a .reg file with the following contents:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Virtual.Machine.HD]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Virtual.Machine.HD\shell]
@="Mount"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Virtual.Machine.HD\shell\Dismount]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Virtual.Machine.HD\shell\Dismount\command]
@="\"C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Virtual Server\\Vhdmount\\vhdmount.exe\" /u \"%1\""
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Virtual.Machine.HD\shell\Mount]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Virtual.Machine.HD\shell\Mount\command]
@="\"C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Virtual Server\\Vhdmount\\vhdmount.exe\" /p \"%1\""
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.vhd]
@="Virtual.Machine.HD"
And then double clicking on the .reg file (to load it into your registry) you will be able to double click a VHD to mount it, and right click on it to dismount it.
Cool...
Cheers,
Ben