Jonas Midstrup's Blog

Fall last year (2009) I was attending a session with Scott Hanselman in Copenhagen, Denmark where he talked about the, back then, brand new features in ASP.NET MVC 2.0. After getting to the conference room at the hotel 15 minutes late, because he went to the wrong hotel (yes Copenhagen can be a large city to travel in he started the session by telling about a new cool feature in Windows 7 where it’s possible to make a bootable virtual harddisk that you can attach in the Disk Manager and then boot up on just like if it was a normal installed OS.

This is cool because you don’t have to run it in the Virtual PC (as a x86 installation – why can’t MS just make the free version of VPC x64 based!?), you can distribute it on multiple PC’s and because it boots up normally it utilizes the hardware in the PC as the normal OS. In that way it becomes the golden mean between a rigid Virtual PC installation and the mess of having two OS-installations.

This I knew I had to try some time and yesterday I got the opportunity. I needed to run a Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise beside my Windows 7 installation to use some of the services in the server for a little project I’m working on. Here I will explain what I did and what I learned.

I have to tell you a very important thing I learned after my PC crashed and didn’t wont to boot up again after I thought I had got everything done exactly as in Scott’s blogposts: YOU NEED TO HAVE WINDOWS 7 ULTIMATE TO GET THIS TO WORK! Otherwise you will find yourself stuck, as I was, with a PC that gives you a strange boot error, a Logitech USB/Bluetooth keyboard that is not working outside of Windows and no PS2 keys anywhere near you so you can skip the error, because PS2 was “so outdated”. Now, when I make something like this from now on, I will have a PS2 keyboard no less than 1 meter away from me

The first thing to do is to make the bootable VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) from a Windows installation ISO. This blog from Scott will tell you what to do:
Step-By-Step: Turning a Windows 7 DVD or ISO into a Bootable VHD Virtual Machine

So I followed Scott’s description of how to make the VHD and I was able to get it done. Remember the /SKU:SERVERENTERPRISE setting in the cscript command if you want to have a enterprise server.

Then I moved on to this post from Scott telling about how to get it to appear when booting up the PC:
Less Virtual, More Machine – Windows 7 and the magic of Boot to VHD

When you have a VHD already you just need to go down to the paragraph with the title “Setting up your Windows Boot Menu to boot to an Existing VHD” and start from there. This is quit straight forward, but remember one thing when doing this: go to the Disk Manager and attach the VHD before doing any of the things in this post! Otherwise it won’t work.

After doing the bcdedit commands and veryfied that your VHD appears in the Windows Boot Manager (remember to be absolutely sure that everything is looking alright here before restarting your system!). The problem is that if the Windows Boot Manager finds that one of the entries is not correct it simply wont but anything, even the OS that is correct! When you boot up now you will have a new OS in the Windows Boot Manager menu that you can choose. The first time you startup the new OS you will have a Administrator user and it will prompt you to give it a password.

Then you are good to go! The coolest thing about all this is that you have all your harddisks in the new system (the VHD will now be your C-drive) and you can move files from one harddisk to the other and even cooler, you can take the VHD, move it to another PC, add it to the Windows Boot Manager using the last post from Scott that I mentioned and you have a full functioning OS with all you need installed.

Have fun with it