Virtualization promised freedom — encapsulating an entire PC into a file. But how to capture a living, breathing physical machine without shutting it down? That was the pain. In 2009, Sysinternals (then already part of Microsoft) released a tiny utility: disk2vdi . Its creator? Mark Russinovich , the legendary OS internals expert.
The idea was deceptively simple: Run disk2vdi on a live Windows system. Select the volumes you want. Click “Create”. Out comes a or .vhd file — ready for VirtualBox or Hyper-V. disk2vdi
Why? Because the core problem it solves — “capture a running Windows disk to a VM format” — is timeless. disk2vdi