Comments on: Windows 7, booting from VHD, converting between VHD and VMDK

By: David

David — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:06:40 +0000

I have been experimenting a bit with this, as well as scouring the internet for clues. Basically, I’ve been led to the following conclusion – anything that uses the Windows 7 bootloader (server 2008r2), or can be made to (vista) is capable of being booted from a vhd. Anything that doesn’t will currently be unable to (due to no driver support for mounting a vhd hard disk) – trying to do so will just lead to an error (usually blue screen) of being unable to mount the device.

This means the only options are either to intergrate/create a vhd device driver for xp/2003/linux or replace it with the Windows 7 bootloader… The first one hasn’t been cracked yet, but it is (in theory) possible to replace the xp bootloader with the windows vista one, and presumably the Windows 7 one…

I’ll report back more when I manage to test this…

By: Stefan Didak

Stefan Didak — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:13:54 +0000

Unfortunately, I don’t think that would work. As far as I know booting from a VHD is only supported for W7 and W2008R2. If someone has actually tried installing an OS other than W7 or W2008R2 and boot it from a VHD I’d like to hear about it.

There are also some other things you may need to take into consideration when it comes to drivers. You may have to sysprep an existing installation to avoid driver issues going from a VMware machine to a bootable VHD.

By: phrontiste

phrontiste — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:03:55 +0000

Hi Stefan,

Thank you for a very useful article ;

If I use starwind to convert a vmware vm (windows 2003 server) to a vhd and then use your steps to make it bootable so that windows 2003 server vm is bootable via the windows 7 boot with vhd option, would that work ?

any ideas or thoughts on this one would be highly helpful.

Kind regards