Probably the emulator delivers BIOS boot only (which is a contradiction, as I really dunno there was ever a phone development platform using BIOS, even as x86-32 atom/baytrail devices… But they would think may not matter, as the emulator itself is to develop solely umode UWP phone apps which shouldn’t be affected by firmware platform differences, not BSPs or drivers (for that there are other products and prepackaged services)).

The program I found uses this api:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/virtdisk/

Interesting stuff!

I put the stuff I found on github:

https://github.com/neozeed/VHD-Utilities

I had to check, this image is actually MBR!. I guess it’s a 32bit leftover of Windows 8/10 … wasn’t the UEFI stuff for Windows 64bit only?

Phones need certain unique partitions for things like the baseband firmware and IMEI/TrustZone/SEC/SecurityCore stuff.

Good thing is that GPT, unlike other partition schemes doesn’t allow you to allocate any “hidden” space outside the partitions from the OS/Umode (and that’s why, for example, GPT dynamic disks have an specific MSR partition to allocate the LDM disk database, unlike on MBR dynamic disks). All space has to be allocated from and to partitions/volumes on a GPT disk. So at least you can see what is going really there, and dump the data from the flash safely without data loss.

These PS scripts don’t work if you don’t have installed also the GUI hyperv manager tools and the hyperv services. Is a lot of cruft you need to have loaded to just resize VHDs.

—
Damn VMware, I really miss so much they don’t have an high performance storage driver as the MS VHD HBA one for their VMDK containers. Their imdisk-like filter driver included in Workstation is a joke, and Arsenal Image Mounter has problems with stuff like DISM and deploying WIM images to their emulated disks.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/hyper-v/resize-vhd

I think this is part of the Hyper-V management tools (aka optional component.)

I also have my own tools just because I prefer Win32:

https://github.com/malxau/yori/blob/master/vhdtool/vhdtool.c