How to copy-paste files to Hyper-V VMs

Here is a quick and easy way to get this work efficiently:

• If you're running the VM, turn it off first.
• find your virtual hard disk image file .vhd of your VM
• Right click on this file and select mount
• This will give "System Reserved" and "Local Disk" drives.
• Open the "Local Disk" drive (this is the OS drive on VM)
• Go there and paste you files.
• Finally unmount or eject one of the drivers
• Run the VM and go the c:\ drive there and you will find your files.

Hope this helps someone :)

Your best options are a plain old network copy and Remote Desktop, which instead allows full clipboard transfers.

RDP can get quite flaky if you try to copy big files over it, thus if big file transfers are required I'd recommend the network; if you just need to copy/paste some text, RDP works great.

Of course, for both options to work, you need the guest system to be connected to your network and have proper TCP/IP settings.

According to this StackOverflow answer it does matter what the guest OS is:

ESM only works with Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 VMs. Since you're using a Win7 VM, ESM isn't going to be available.

Although the accepted answer here says there is no way to copy and paste things, I can do it between my Windows 8.1 host and Windows 10 Tech preview running in Hyper-V with ESM. I have yet to find the Windows 8.1 documentation that explains it, but for Server 2012R2 see this TechNet article.

Edit: I found this very practical guide on ESM, which clarified that you also need the Pro or Enterprise versions.