Note: Versions previous to Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 create disk images that have a 511-byte disk footer. So the hard disk footer can exist in the last 511 or 512 bytes of the file that holds the hard disk image.

Also, it appears that the string is "conectix" if

Hard Disk Footer Field Descriptions
The following provides detailed definitions of the hard disk footer fields.
Cookie
Cookies are used to uniquely identify the original creator of the hard disk image. The values are case-sensitive.
Microsoft uses the “conectix” string to identify this file as a hard disk image created by Microsoft Virtual Server, Virtual PC, and predecessor products. The cookie is stored as an eight-character ASCII string with the “c” in the first byte, the “o” in the second byte, and so on.