VIRTUALDESKTOPBLOG

A few weeks ago I finally got a new laptop from my company. Ok it’s still only a Dell Latitude D830, but…. it’s virtualization compatible!
So now I could do what I planned a while ago; Install Windows 2008 R2 on my laptop and play around with Hyper-V.

So I installed Windows Server 2008 R2, installed the Hyper-V role, cool stuff! But now I need an OS to do my work on and I was not planning to use my parent partition for this.
So I thought I’ll just install a Windows 7 virtual machine and use that VM in full screen mode to work on… no problem right? Well I can tell you… the performance is not very satisfactory. So what now?

Luckily for me Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7 have the capability to be booted directly from a VHD. So this means that you can create a dual boot scenario where you can choose between the natively installed Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 that boots from VHD. What’s extra cool about this, is that for backup up your complete Windows 7 workspace, you only have to make a copy of the VHD! For who likes this, here’s what you have to do;

1.    Of course you first have to install Windows 2008 R2 and with the Hyper-V role on top of it.
2.    After that create a new virtual machine and install Windows 7 on that machine. Make sure to use a fixed size VHD! Otherwise you will begin to notice the defragmentation after some time
3.    After the installation of Windows 7 including your favorite  apps I advise you to make a copy of the VHD so that you can always revert to your clean installation.
4.    Now use the following commands to add Windows 7 to the boot menu;

bcdedit /copy {current} /d "Windows 7 VHD"

This command returns a guid for the new boot entry. Use this guid in the next commands.

bcdedit /set <guid> device vhd=[driveletter:]\<directory>\<vhd filename>

bcdedit /set <guid> osdevice vhd=[driverletter:]\<directory>\<vhd filename>

bcdedit /set <guid> detecthal on

This should look something like this: