• Download Disk2VHD and install it.
  • Open Disk2VHD and select the partitions that make up the entire disk, do not select any external drives or other internal drives.  Those will be converted separately.
  • Plug in an external drive (SSD preferred for speed) that is at least twice the size of the total disk space used. Ensure the drive is formatted exfat so that windows and linux can read and write to it. We will have to convert the VHDX file to raw in a later step which will take up the same space as the VHDX file.
  • Click Create and choose your storage location.  In my case G:\SERVER.VHDX
  • Once the conversion is complete it will just return to the same screen without a ”Complete” or ”Success” message.
  • Disconnect the external drive and connect it to your Proxmox server on the fastest port available.
  • Open up the proxmox management console
  • Click your server at the top (under the Datacenter label).
  • Click Disks and see if your external drives is showing up.  If it isn’t the easiest thing to do is restart the server.
  • You can also run lsblk or fdisk -l in the Shell to locate drives
  • Mount the drive “in the example case ”sdb1“ by first creating a directory in the root.
  • Type mkdir us and press enter
  • mount /dev/sdb1 /usb
  • Now you can cd /usb ad press enter
  • Type ls to list the contents to make sure you see the same data.
  • Convert the VHDX to raw file by typing “qemu-img-convert -f vhdx -O raw SERVER.VHDX SERVER.raw” (There is zero progress indication.  When it finishes it’s drops back to the prompt.)
  • Create the VM you want to assign this drive, but make the drive size very small (10GB).  Click here for standard windows server 2019 settings.  The drive size doesn’t matter because it will be deleted.
  • Make a note of your VM storage label and VM number inside proxmox console.  In my case it’s labeled VM_Storage (case sensitive) and 100
  • After the conversion is complete while still in the same folder type the following “qm importdisk 100 SERVER,raw VM_Storage —-format raw”. This will show progress.
  • Once the import is complete you can check the VM hardware tab and you should have  “Unused Disk 0”
  • Double-Click on Unused Disk and choose your options. SCSI - Cache: Write Back - Discard ✔️
  • Click the unneeded disk that was created during the VM creation and choose “Detach” choose Yes then select the 10GB drive likely labeled disk-0 and choose Remove
  • Click Options on the left side and edit Boot Order
  • Choose scsi1, the imported drive.  It should have disk-1 in the label.  Click OK