Dual Boot Windows 8 from VHD using Windows Setup - Concurrency, Inc.

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September 15, 2011 | SHANNON FRITZ | INFRASTRUCTURE

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Dual Boot Windows 8 from VHD using Windows Setup

Are you running Windows 7 and have things just the wayyou like them, but youre really curious to see how Windows 8 looks and feels? Using this method, you can boot your computer between your existing Windows 7 installation or Windows 8 without needing to sacrifice disk space! Using a Dynamic Virtual Hard Disk (VHD), you can install Windows 8 to a single file that is stored on your Windows 7 file system, and then boot directly from that Virtual Hard Disk. This lets you choose to load either your existing OS or the new Windows 8 at boot time. You are not doing an in-place upgrade and you are not doing a rebuild. Its just a new install of Windows 8 and you dont have to trash your existing setup to do it. A couple notes before getting started

Document & Records Management If you are using BitLocker on your windows 7 Computer, do not create the Windows 8 VHD on your BitLocker encrypted volume. If all of your drives are encrypted, then you wont be able to use Boot from VHD. Pausing BitLocker Encryption is not a workaround. Exchange If you are using Windows XP as your current operating system, you cannot Boot from VHD, so this method of Dual-Booting is not available to you. You can only (officially) use this on an existing Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 computer. When making the VHD, make sure the maximum size that you specify is less than the actual size of your disk. For example, if you have a 60GB SSD drive, make sure the VHD Max size is less than 60GB and not the 100GB I use in the example below. Lync Concurrency Experts Video System Center System Center Business Intelligence Lets get started! If you havent already, download Windows 8 here and browse the BuildWindows.com web site. Podcast Governance Governance Unified Communications

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Dual Boot Windows 8 from VHD using Windows Setup - Concurrency, Inc.

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On the computer which already has Windows 7 installed, boot from the Windows 8 media and youll launch the installer. Before clicking Install Now, hit Shift+F10 and the WinPE command prompt will appear.

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Note: If you want to boot from USB instead of burning a DVD, you can use the very handy WUDT tool from CodePlex which will make a bootable USB stick from the ISO for you. Its time to create the VHD that will be your Windows 8 drive. Run diskpart from the CMD window, then issue the following commands to diskpart:
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1. list disk This shows your currently attached hard disks. In this example I only have one, Disk 0. 2. select disk 0 You want to select the disk where youre current operating system (Windows 7) is installed, so if you have multiple disks available, you might use a different number. 3. list vol Show all the volumes that exist on that disk. Existing installations of Windows 7 will usually have a 100MB volume that is the System Reserved partition (used as the boot loader and leveraged by BitLocker) and then the actual OS volume is much larger. In example you can see my Windows 7 volume is actually assigned to letter D (although when booting normally it would be my C: drive). 4. create vdisk file=d:\Windows8.vhd maximum=100000 type=expandable This creates a Dynamic VHD that can grow to ~100GB in the root of my Windows 7 partition. If your hard drive is smaller than 100GB then be sure to use a smaller value for maximum that is less than your actual disk size. 5. select vdisk file=d:\Windows8.vhd after selecting this vdisk, the following commands will apply to it 6. attach vdisk The VHD will be mounted and the disk will be available to the windows installer 7. exit were done with diskpart

All those commands will look like this:

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Dual Boot Windows 8 from VHD using Windows Setup - Concurrency, Inc.

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Now you can close the Command Prompt and return to the Install Windows wizard and click Install Now. When asked where you want to install Windows, you should see a new Disk 1 listed with Unallocated Space. Youll notice that when you select this disk the installer will tell you that Windows cannot be installed to this disk but the Next button is enabled. If you click Next, it will in fact install Windows there just fine.

Once the installation is complete and your computer reboots, you will see a new boot loader that asks you to Choose an operating system and you can select either the new install of Windows 8 or your previously existing OS. The first time this appears you get about 3 seconds and it auto loads Windows 8 to finish the setup. On subsequent reboots itll give you 30 seconds before auto selecting it.

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Dual Boot Windows 8 from VHD using Windows Setup - Concurrency, Inc.

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Now you can browse around Windows 8 on your Native hardware! You can also still access files on your Windows 7 disk. Open Explorer and youll see it appear as a different drive letter (D: in this case) and you can browse around and copy/modify files as you wish.

Notice that the D: looks full? This is because the VHD you created for Windows 8 is reporting its maximum size instead of its actual size. When you boot into Windows 7 youll see the VHD is actually only about 8GB. Are you all done with Windows 8 and cant figure out how to shut down? Take your mouse and hover over the start button, or touch your mouse cursor to the bottom left corner of the screen and a small start menu will appear. Click on Settings, then Power and choose Shutdown.

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Now you can enjoy the best of both worldsNjoy!

UPDATE: Windows 8 Beta Microsoft released the Consumer Preview build of Windows 8 and I am happy to tell you that the instructions above work exactly the same. I expect it will continue to work with all future builds of Windows 8 as well.

The boot screen is a little different now in display but it otherwise works like the Developer Preview.

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One other note, the option to Shutdown in beta is no longer on a Windows button on the left. Instead bump the bottom right corner of the screen and youll see a new Settings side bar where Power -> Shutdown can be found.

UPDATE: How do you remove the Dual Boot option when youre done with it? Removing the Windows 8 Dual-Boot option is pretty straight forward. Just boot into your Windows 7 OS and start MSConfig.exe. From there, select the instance of Windows 8 and click Delete. Make sure you do this from the OS that is installed on the disk and not the VHD!

After you delete it and reboot, you can delete the Windows8.vhd file.

Shannon Fritz
Infrastructure Architect and Server Team Lead at Concurrency. Shannon is an MVP in Forefront and Enterprise Security, MCSE in Private Cloud and MCSA Windows Server 2012. He's also a selfprofessed media junkie. Just ask him about MediaCenter!

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azzu

hi..... i did every thing u specified.... every thing went fine but during the final stage of installation i m getting an error 'windows could not update the computers boot configuration installation cannot proceed' pls guide me

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Dual Boot Windows 8 from VHD using Windows Setup - Concurrency, Inc.

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