Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Changing Virtual Hard Drive from IDE to SCSI

Well I created virtual server with a single Virtual IDE hard drive (VHD) that ran out of space so I decided I was going to find a way to enlarge it and also switch to SCSI, because I read it was better performing. Well I found alot of post about expanding the hard drive and I will post the details of that in another post.

Here I want to post the steps to switching to a SCSI drive.


  1. Open the Virtual Server Web Administration site and select configure your specific Virtual Machine
  2. In the Virtual Machine Configuration windows, select Add SCSI Adapter ID 7
  3. Make sure you leave your boot disk as IDE disk
  4. Start your virtual machine
  5. You should see the following when the adapter is registered "Adaptec AIC-7870 PCI SCSI Adapter". The virtual machine will now be able to boot with SCSI but this SCSI driver is very slow.
  6. Right-click on the Adaptec driver and select Update Driver
  7. Choose the Install from a list or specific location and Have Disk options
  8. Browse to the C:\Program Files\Virtual Machine Additions folder and click OK
  9. The Microsoft Virtual Machine PCI SCSI Controller driver should now be installed
  10. Shutdown your virtual machine
  11. In the Virtual Server Virtual Machine configuration select hard disks in the configuration section
  12. Change your boot hard disk to the SCSI ID 0
  13. Click OK
  14. Start the virtual machine
good luck and remember backups..