I have been having a play with the boot from VHD functions in Windows 7, it seems like a really useful feature when you need the raw power of your PC, but would like the ease of management of Virtual PCs (i.e. can copy them around and archive them), There are many posts on the steps that are required to add a boot from VHD partition to an existing standard install (remember the VHD must be for a Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 operating system), I followed notes on knom’s developer corner. Just a couple of things that got me:
- The notes say to press Shift F10 to open the console and enter the DISKPART commands to create and mount the new VHD. This is fine, but I then closed the window to continue, this is wrong. In step 6 the notes do say to Alt Tab back to the installer and this is vital. If you close the command window, as I did, the new VDISK is dismounted so you cannot install to it.
- After the install I could dual boot, I had a ‘real’ Windows 7 install and my ‘boot from VHD’ install. The boot manager showed both in the menu, but they both had the same name ‘Windows 7’, only trial and error showed me which was which. Also my new VHD boot was the default. All a bit confusing and not what I was after. As I find the command line to BCDEDIT not the friendliest for editing the boot setting I tried to use EasyBCD to edit one of the name to ‘Windows 7 VHD’ and alter the default to my original installation. This caused me to end up with two boot options that both pointed to the ‘real’ installation. My guess is that EasyBCD does not understand VHD boot on Windows 7. I therefore had to use the manual command as listed on TechEd. Once this was done all was OK
The next step is to try a VHD boot from an external USB or eSATA disk.