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I have two questions,

  1. Can I use existing 2nd Hard Drive as External Hard Drive inside Virtual Server Instance running on same machine?

  2. If I use right now Virtual Server 2005 and run my server, tomorrow if I buy HyperV on different machine, can I just simply use same Virtual Hard Drive in Hyper V Without having to reinstall everything?

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1 - If this hard drive is USB, then you will not be able to access it in a guest. Virtual Server does not support USB from the guest operating system.

2 - Yes, Hyper-V will read your Virtual Server 2005 VHD files. This is essentially how we migrated from VS2005 to Hyper-V by manually attaching the VHD files to new machine configurations. You will need to uninstall the old guest service and install the new Hyper-V guest services for everything to work smoothly though.

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  • +1 - Uninstalling the VMAdditions before you make the move is the key here. If you don't do that, things quickly could get painful.
    – Scott Ivey
    Sep 11, 2009 at 18:06
  • And there's no going back, I believe I read at one point that once Hyper-V puts its stamp on that VHD, it's upgraded, and won't be usable on the 2005 server.
    – Kara Marfia
    Sep 11, 2009 at 19:28
  • Thanks, but we have not installed vmadditions and we dont need it either, i am not aware if anything gets installed automatically or not, but as long as we setup vhd, access via network and dont install anything onto it, its good to go right.
    – Akash Kava
    Sep 11, 2009 at 19:51
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You can put a .VHD on the external drive and use it - However be aware you can have your disk drivers load after Hyper-V tries to start and get errors - I never use external drives but that problem goes back to window service dependancies and was a common question in the early days of Virtual Server.

Steve Radich - http://www.VirtualServerFAQ.com - http://www.BitShop.com

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