For those unfamiliar with the Sysinternals tools I recommend that you begin to navigate because there are plenty of Technet and with very good features to use.

In this case the tool Disk2vhd commented that not new but today may have more usefulness long ago. With this tool we can convert a physical disk in a VHD file to use as a virtual machine in Virtual PC, Hyper-V or mount as another drive in Windows 7.

Remember that Windows 7 can mount VHD disks directly from the Disk Manager and see it as one more unit of our team. This is super useful to modify the content of the VHD we have.

I can create a VHD from my current C drive because as you see in the image requires 76Gb and I have 64Gb free (but I can comment on the steps. There really is not much to discuss and once you select the volume and where they want to leave the file, click on Create and make ready and have a full VHD disk drive.

Then you can mount that disk in a Hyper-V for example and have the virtualized machine.

Another option if you want to create a VHD vacuum is from the same Windows 7 or if you want to add as a unit or make attachments.

By right clicking on Disk Management to create a VHD can select the size that we will want, in a way that is fixed in full size or in a file that grows dynamically as you occupy the space.

The only choice we have to say the location of the VHD and even can mount read-only to avoid making changes that do not want, or that the operating system does not write things that do not want.

Another tool that can play through Sysinternals and which serves for its laboratories virtualization. Eye for production or migration can also be used as it is very practical.

Link | Download Disk2vhd