How to "open" existing VMs in Hyper-V without importing them?

Posted by Borek on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Borek
Published on 2012-06-29T14:29:55Z Indexed on 2012/06/29 15:17 UTC
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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 firmly believe that when I have all the files constituting a VM (the VHD file, some XML files describing the settings etc.) it must 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.

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