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[Rollin Profile]

Hi Guys & Gals.

This past week I have had a goal of creating a bootable Virtual Hard Drive of Windows 7 Ultimate & installing it using an administrative command prompt.
Amazingly after about 6-7 failures & 2 successes I finally got it to automatically create a virtual partition that shows up in the restart boot menu and doesn’t appear to suffer any performance loss that I can detect.

Installing Windows 7 this way means that one doesn’t run the OS in a host OS (the .vhd file does sit in another OS though), so one has to restart the PC to change OS’s if one chooses. It is nice not having to create a partition to install the OS in before installing it, among other things.

My last install of the bootable VHD of Windows 7 Ultimate x86, after exiting the command prompt & restarting the PC only took 10 MINUTES to hit the desktop, it “will boot directly to the Out Of Box Experience” which does save install time.

In case a PROnetworks member wants to try this they will need a file I received from Microsoft during beta testing, I don’t know where one can find it otherwise: bootvhdbcd.cmd

NTS this is what my testing looked like in screen shots.

My first successful install, but the partition was to large @ 40 GB


WIM2VHD entry in command prompt, note I added the "size:15000" (MB) to the command


Install of VHD OS entry in command prompt


Boot Menu w/ OS choices


First Desktop in bootable VHD OS installation


Computer w/ a 15 GB partition for the VHD OS


Performance test





Here is the literature (& download) I used to get this working.

Step-By-Step: Turning a Windows 7 DVD or ISO into a Bootable VHD Virtual Machine

Windows(R) Image to Virtual Hard Disk (WIM2VHD) Converter

[Rollin Profile]

Here are some benchmarks I just ran, note the Hdd Read doesn’t work in the VHD because:
"The disk cannot be accurately assessed while the system is booted from a Virtual Hard Disk."

[Rollin Profile]

I ran more tests & have a updated picture for you, along w/ the code I used to test with in a Administrative Command Prompt.



winsat disk -ran -read -ransize 4096 -drive C
winsat mem
winsat cpu –encryption
winsat cpu –compression
winsat dwm -normalw 10 -glassw 4 -time 10 -v –fullscreen
winsat d3d -totalobj 20 -objs C(20) -totaltex 10 -texpobj C(1) -alushader -noalpha -fullscreen -v -time 10

[Grav!ty Profile]

Do you need to reboot to get to the Windows 7 non-VHD installation or can one exit out of the "virtual" installation directly to it?

[Rollin Profile]

With the entry in the boot menu for this Windows 7 OS it works the same way as when one wants to boot to another OS in the boot menu, it is not being hosted as w/ a VPC application running it.
So Restarting the PC is needed to boot to another OS in ones boot menu.

I found that once the WIM2VHD file is created one can save it to a safe place & use it over & over thus not having to that step, including having to take the files off ones DVD first.

[shreader]

I wonder if once the VHD file is created, updated & activated if one can save that in a storage drive for reinstall again at a later time.

I gotta try that

[shreader]

Here is the info from TechNet FAQ on this I just found:

What is a native-boot VHD?
In Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 you can configure a VHD for native boot. This means that a VHD can be used as the running operating system on designated hardware without a parent operating system, virtual machine, or hypervisor. Furthermore, if you use native boot, you have full access to all devices and file system volumes on the physical computer, including the volumes inside the VHD. In contrast, when Windows runs in a virtual machine, only one file system volume in the virtual disk (volume C:) is available to guest machines (unless you share another volume to the virtual machine).

Note the following functionality with native boot:

Native boot from VHD is only available with Windows 7 Enterprise, Windows 7 Ultimate and all versions of Windows Server 2008 R2.


When you perform a native boot, file system partitions that are contained in the VHD are automatically attached and the virtual volumes are visible.


Native-boot supports all three VHD file types: fixed, dynamic, and differencing. When you native boot from a dynamic VHD file, the VHD is automatically expanded to the maximum size. If the physical host volume of the VHD file does not have enough free disk space for the maximum size of the dynamic VHD, the boot process will fail.


Native-boot is supported on computers that have either BIOS-based or UEFI-based firmware.


For instructions about how to configure a computer for native boot from a VHD, see Walkthrough: Deploy a Virtual Hard Disk for Native Boot.

[Nativedude Profile WebsiteICQ]

cool never know when this might come in handy