Native boot for Windows 10 or later requires the. VHDXs can be applied to PCs or devices that have no other installations of Windows, without a virtual machine or hypervisor. A hypervisor is a layer of software under the operating system that runs virtual computers. This enables greater flexibility in workload distribution because a single set of tools can be used to manage images for virtual machines and designated hardware.
Create a partition for the Windows files, format it, and assign it a drive letter. This drive letter will appear in File Explorer. Copy the VHDX to a network share or removable storage drive. Clean and prepare the destination PC's hard drive.
Connect to the network drive or storage location where you copied the VHDX in step 3. That way, if anything out of the ordinary were to occur as you follow the steps for creating a dual-boot system, you will be able to return to your current configuration.
Furthermore, I recommend that you also create a separate backup of your data. While it may sound like overkill, having an extra backup will give you peace of mind. To access Backup and Restore, click the Start button, type Backup in the Search box, and press [Enter] when Backup and Restore appears in the result pane. Now that you have your VHD established, installing Windows 8 in a dual-boot configuration should be a pretty straightforward operation.
Let's take a closer look. At this point, Windows Setup will prompt you to choose the location to which you want to install Windows 8 and you can now select your VHD, which will be designated as Unallocated Space and be the size that you specified. If you want to alter the amount of time before Windows 8 runs, you can click the Change defaults or choose other options at the bottom of the screen. There are actually a multitude of options that you can change and I'll cover all of them in a future article.
What do you think about being able to create bootable Windows 7 VHDs that run like a dual boot setup? Will this be something that you will use to test Windows 8? As always, if you have comments or information to share about this topic, please take a moment to drop by the TechRepublic Community Forums and let us hear from you.
Click Disk Management in the pane on the left side of the window and wait until you see all currently installed disks in the contents pane, as shown here:. As you can see, this machine has a single hard disk with the tiny MB boot partition and a much larger partition used for Windows and all data files.
Click Create VHD to get started. Click Browse to choose the location where you want your VHD stored, and give it a descriptive name. The name in this screenshot includes CP, to indicate that I originally did this with the Consumer Preview.
Watch the progress bar in the lower right corner of the Disk Management console to see your virtual disk being created. It only takes a few seconds for a dynamically expanding disk; a fixed size VHD takes several minutes.
Do whatever it takes to start your computer using that bootable media. Pick a language U. English is the default , click the Install button, and enter the Windows 8 product key. Yes, you must enter a valid product key.
Unlike with Windows 7, you can't leave this box blank. Also note that your new installation will be activated immediately when you restart. You have now reached the point where you need to tell Windows that you want to do a custom installation on your new virtual hard disk.
So, just for this one step, you need to dip down into the Windows Command Prompt. Before you can finish this step, you need to know the drive letter that Windows 8 Setup thinks your VHD file is stored on.
If you see the VHD folder, great. If not, try dir D: , dir E: , and so on, until you locate the correct drive letter. After confirming those details, type diskpart and press Enter to open the command-line disk partitioning utility.
You can now click the Custom option in the Windows 8 setup dialog box. That takes you to a screen like this one:. It can indeed.
Click Next to continue.
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