Booting Windows 7 or 2008 from a vhd on a USB drive

after struggling for a week i managed to boot my machine from a vhd located on an external USB drive.

steps:

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1- prepare a vhd file that has windows 7 or windows 2008 (there are thousands of blogs on how to do this step)

 

2- copy the vhd to the local hard drive in any parition that has enugh space for the vhd to expand

 

3- boot from your normal windows (not the vhd that we just prepared)

 

4- right click my computer and select manage then go to disk management

 

3- attach the vhd after which it will appear as a normal disk drive volume

 

4- go to https://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=6851 and download pwboot then copy it inside the vhd drive

 

5- shut down the current windows and boot your machine into the vhd (again there are many blogs explaining how)

 

6- run the pwboot (FROM WITHIN THE VHD IMAGE)

 

7- use bcdboot to copy the system files from the vhd to the physical USB drive

 

8- restart your machine

 

9- select boot from USB drive

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2009
  Marauderz great question bcdedit is your tool to configure the boot options. do you remember boot.ini we used to run notepad to edit it but now you have to use bcdedit and point it towards the boot manager to configure it. so if i have 3 vhds on my USB. i will go to command prompt and three of them as 3 different entries so when you boot you will see three different boot options (like dual boot) , every entry points to a different vhd if you want to add a new entry it is easier to copy one of the existing entries and modify it what did you do exactly ?

• Anonymous
  October 18, 2009
  Here's what I did

• Installed Win7 Ultimate onto VHD
• Booted into it
• Ran PWBoot on it.
• Plugged in my USB drive
• ran "BCDBOOT C:windows /s USBDrive:"
• Rebooted into normal Win7
• Copied VHD to USBDrive:
• BCDEdited the boot store in USBDrive: to use the VHD file to boot.
• It WILL boot, BUT.. it'll never make it into windows cause it BSOD and restarts soon into the booting process, I think it's because it's confused about what it's installed on.

• Anonymous
  October 18, 2009
  when yo booted your machine lastly , did you change the boot from BIOS to be from USB drive ?

• Anonymous
  October 19, 2009
  Yes, it's definetly booting from the USB drive. It's jsut that it's bluescreening in the booting process.

• Anonymous
  October 19, 2009
  Yes, it's definetly booting from the USB drive. It's jsut that it's bluescreening in the booting process.

• Anonymous
  October 19, 2009
  it has to be RTM not RC are you using RTM ?

• Anonymous
  April 10, 2010
  Hey - great post... I am SOOO close to getting this to work, I can boot to the vhd if it's on my local c: drive, but not when it's on my external usb drive. I CAN boot from usb drive (i've installed windows 7 from there) - so I know my machine sets it. Would you please tellme how I should set my bcdedit to support pointing to my "test.vhd" on my external usb drive? Windows Boot Loader

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identifier              {577f92c3-fbca-11de-89b9-cb53572a6d85} device                  vhd=[H:]test.vhd,locate=custom:12000002 path                    Windowssystem32winload.exe description             vhd locale                  en-US inherit                 {6efb52bf-1766-41db-a6b3-0ee5eff72bd7} recoverysequence        {577f92c4-fbca-11de-89b9-cb53572a6d85} recoveryenabled         Yes osdevice                vhd=[H:]test.vhd,locate=custom:22000002 systemroot              Windows resumeobject            {577f92c2-fbca-11de-89b9-cb53572a6d85} nx                      OptIn detecthal               Yes /////////////// Your assistance would be greatly appreciated!!

• Anonymous
  September 28, 2011
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  August 31, 2013
  the device usb have  more space than .vhd image when expanded