I had a PC with two physical disks:
- C: containing the host operating system
- D: containing a folder
D:\VMs
where all my virtual machines were stored
Now, the C: disk died. I bought a new one, reinstalled Windows on it, enabled Hyper-V feature and now I just need to open the VMs from the D:\VMs
folder. However, I don't seem to be able to find a menu item or anything that would allow me to do that – the only thing I see is the "import" command which unfortunately requires the VMs to be explicitly exported (my machines weren't).
I would think that when I have all the files constituting a VM (the VHD file, some XML files describing the settings etc.) it should be somehow possible to just "open" these existing VMs in Hyper-V, right? What command am I missing?
Edit: I know I can create a blank virtual machines and then just point them to use existing VHDs. However, I am not sure about all the different settings I've made to those VMs so I hope there's a way to simply open those existing VMs instead of recreating them.
Best Answer
this is possible, but it's not supported by microsoft.
basically, you have to create a new VM, copy the settings to the XML files, and rename the snapshots.
complete directions are here: http://eniackb.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-to-recover-hyper-v-virtual-machine.html