Too many times, I’ve backed up what I thought were relevant parts of my office computer to take along with me on a road trip, only to find, once I’m at my destination, that I hadn’t included some out-of-the-way directory in my backup. Via Lifehacker (Disk2vhd Turns Your PC Into a Virtual Machine), I ran across a Windows utility called disk2vhd that creates a file representing a “virtual hard drive,” which is essentially a file containing the contents of an entire physical disk.
The idea behind this VHD file is that it can be used inside of a “virtual machine,” which is an environment that operates like a physical computer, except that this environment has been created by a computer program. This kind of approach is useful for testing, or for running multiple virtual machines on the same computer simultaneously.
But you don’t need to use a virtual machine program to make use of VHD files.
Creating the VHD file is pretty easy with disk2vhd, as it doesn’t matter whether you have software running while you’re creating the disk image. Afterward, the VHD file can be used with a virtual machine program (like the free Microsoft Virtual PC), or it can simply be “mounted” as if it were a drive on a computer, using any program that works with VHD files.
A little while ago, I ran across a program called Gizmo that does exactly that, although I had been using it to mount images of data CDs that I carry around (indeed, my Aspire One doesn’t have an optical drive, so creating .ISO images and mounting them using a program like Gizmo is about the only way I can think of – short of plugging in a USB optical drive – to conveniently install software on such machine).
So now, after having created a VHD file of my work computer, I can access the entire contents of my work computer while on the road.