VHD Native Boot – some gotchas to be aware of [update]
VHD native boot – the nice new feature in WS08R2 and Win7 that allows boot from VHD. It works, you can even boot from a VHD on USB external drive, which is nice, since normally Win does not allow boot from external USB (treats it as REMOVABLE and won’t install).
However there are 2 issues I met that were undocumented on the web:
- You cannot perform a BARE METAL backup of a WS08R2 machine running on VHD. I needed to do this to transfer a VHD from 1 hardware to a different one. Ooops – no option to do that:( And since this is a full fledged VM (SQL, Sharepoint etc) Sysprep is no option.
- If you want to move a native boot VHD to Hyper-V you need to:
- Mount the VHD, open the HKLM hive from that VHD in regedit (LOAD HIVE)
- go to CCS\Services\Intelide and change Startup to 0 (start on boot)
- Only then you will be able to boot a VM running on hyper-v with the VHD you used for native boot.
One more interesting thing my friend, Jakub, pointed me to: if you want to move the vhd from 1 hardware to another remember this:
bcdedit /set {guid} detecthal on (Refer to: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd799299(WS.10).aspx)
For most other issues you will find useful links on the web, e.g:
http://blogs.msdn.com/bramveen/archive/2009/10/27/swapping-between-native-vhd-boot-and-hyper-v.aspx
Nice link about doing vhd boot without any OS (note you can use normal windows 7/R2 installation dvd instead of WinPE): http://blogs.msdn.com/mikeormond/archive/2009/10/09/boot-windows-7-from-vhd-without-installing-a-native-os.aspx
And a step-by-step video: http://www.ditii.com/2009/10/19/native-boot-windows-7-windows-server-2008-r2-from-vhd-on-a-windows-xp-pc/2/
Any my friends step by step for booting vhd off usb (in PL though): http://app-v.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!12E9A21E4AEEFADB!275.entry
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