Convert .gho (Ghost) image to .vhd (Virtual Hard Disk)

How to convert a .gho image (Ghost file) to a .vhd (Virtual Hard Disk), P2V for Hyper-V!

Open Disk Management, right click Open Disk Management 🙂 choose ‘Create VHD’, specify the virtual hard disk location:

Create VHD

Right-click the new disk in Disk Management, and select Initialize Disk:

Initialize Disk

Yeah it’s online:

image

Still in Windows, start Ghost DOS version (Ghost32.exe), and do a Disk From Image restore: (Local –> Disk–> From Image)

restore convert .gho Ghost file to .vhd Virtual Hard Disk

Select the .gho Ghost file:

restore convert .gho Ghost file to .vhd Virtual Hard Disk

Choose where to apply the image. We apply the image on the newly created Virtual Hard Disk (VHD file we just created):

restore convert .gho Ghost file to .vhd Virtual Hard Disk Ghost

Ghost Ghosting done

You have a VHD file, converting done.

14 thoughts on “Convert .gho (Ghost) image to .vhd (Virtual Hard Disk)

  1. Saulo

    Fiz este procedimento porem nĂŁo sobe o WinXP e o Win7 fica bootando.
    Podem me ajudar??

  2. bennebiest Post author

    What do you mean excatly?
    This procedure is not focused on a specific Windows version.

    Please give some more info about your issue.

  3. ebell

    You will need Windows 7 to perform these procedures.

  4. Richard

    Brilliant! I have been trying to do this very thing for years because I had a 20-year-old DOS PC with a custom app that I have not been able to get rid of and not sure what we would do if the thing ever stopped. I had the .GHO but couldn’t use it because I had to get the specific board (ISA slots and all) and that was not happening in these times.

    Brilliant, I say!

  5. San

    thank you so much. i was looking for so many converters and finally reached your site and got my issue solved in mins.

  6. Bill Church

    Great idea, it worked fine for me!

    Also, I used this in reverse as a V2P solution. I had a hardware failure on a hyper-v server and had no other virtualization capable hardware spare to build a new server. I did however have a spare pc that was capable of running it as physical.

    I took the disk containing the VMs out of the crashed server and placed in my workstation. I mounted the VM I wanted in Disk Manager. Then I was able to run Ghost32 and take an image of that disk. Went to the new hardware and restored the image.

    That was I believe the simplest way of achieving the V2P transition.

    Thanks again!

  7. Abhijit

    Hi,

    Great !! It works for me.. Thanks for solution for V2P

    Cheers 🙂

  8. remy B

    Hi,
    I’m on Windows 7, wich software can i use for lunch this virtual machine.
    The software on windows doesn’t work.
    Thanks for your help.

    rémy

  9. kevin

    two years later your solution works like charm… just tried it now for the first time. Thank you so much God bless.

  10. Suksan

    You can convert a “.GHO” file to a “.VHD” file using ghost32.exe, ghost64.exe or the Linux version of ghost.exe.
    To convert the file, run ghost with the following command line:

    -clone,mode=restore,src=C:\image.gho,dst=V:\image.vhd

  11. chhai

    I have Windows 10 already installed. i create new .vhd, then restored one more Win7 ghost to that new .vhd and hope to got dual boot alone side with my windows 10. But it’s not. Any idea?

  12. Luca

    Thank you! I was looking for something to create .vhd easily.

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