I found a really handy blog entry today with a short registry modification you can make so you can double-click on a VHD file to mount it as a drive on your system.

http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2006/09/01/734435.aspx

This is really great news for data recovery. I’m currently researching the potential synergy between Microsoft Virtual Server and the image-based backup functionality in Windows Vista, which apparently saves files in the same format as Virtual PC uses (VHD). It would be so neat to be able to spin up a virtual machine from a Windows Vista backup in a pinch, but it seems there are some complications. More on that in a future post.