How can I copy a VHD image back to a physical disc?

Question

It's quite easy to backup a real drive to VHD, e.g. with Sysinternal's Disk2VHD on XP or with Windows Image Backup on Windows 7. But how do I copy that file back?

It's possible by booting a recovery CD or the Windows installation DVD. But can it also be done from a running operation system? Can it be scripted?

We want to clone a drive to another drive daily using this.

Answer 1

There are at least two similar questions that got accepted answers:

http://superuser.com/questions/40294/copying-a-vhd-to-a-physical-disk

Vdisk (vhd) to physical

But you can't do it from a running OS.

It would be a hard thing to script this. Following the Linux dd aproach one could say that everything is possible. Boot from PXE, locate the VHD, locate the physical disc, dd from V to P, when finished reboot.

Answer 2

Not aware of a free way but I know one of Acronis's products ('True Image'?) can do this.

Answer 3

qemu-img command which is part of the QEMU emulator package supports VHD according to its manual page (though I have never needed this myself). I do not know if this works on Windows but on Linux at least it does (I suppose it does not matter as you did not tag your desired platform?).