G. Morgan said:
Windows 7
I made a .VHD file of my primary boot partition, and put the file
on another partition on the same HDD. I thought I could simply
boot into it when added to the BCD table. I was wrong.
I open diskmgmt.msc, and select "attach VHD". Then I initialized
it, assigned a drive letter and it shows up as RAW type.
I used EasyBCD to add the .vhd file to the boot menu, no joy.
Missing files supposedly on %system%. Tried to boot in a Oracle
VM, get "missing operating system'.
What can I do to get this thing bootable?
Does the original system have "C:" and also "System Reserved" partition ?
One holds the OS and the other holds boot files. One is marked active
(boot flag) and the other isn't.
It's also possible to have an installation, where everything needed is within C:.
But such a setup would not be suited to Bitlocker encryption.
Also, the .vhd created by making a "system image", is as far as I know,
just a partition. There's no "MBR" in it.
You can try using a tool such as a P2V tool, and see if that works.
When I tested this, by copying my WinXP setup to the virtual world,
it worked. Only activation was an issue. I was able to get the thing
to boot. So the WinXP that was running VPC2007, ended up having
a copy of itself running as a guest. I tossed the .vhd after getting
that far, as it was just an experiment to see if the P2V really worked.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415
Disk2vhd will take as much of the disk, as is needed to model
both the MBR sector, and the partitions you tell it to capture.
As long as the size doesn't exceed the claimed limits for the
tool, chances are you'll be OK. The MBR copied using that method,
may "mention" other partitions, but the other partitions won't
actually be copied. When the OS attempts to access them, the
attempt will fail, and as far as I know, there are no side
effects from the failure. When I had it copy my WinXP disk,
the copied MBR said there were four partitions on the .vhd,
but in fact, the only partition that worked, was WinXP C:
(which is what I wanted copied to a virtual environment).
When I run System Image on my Windows 7 laptop, it makes a .vhd
per partition, and in doing so, the MBR is not captured. It would
be kinda tough to use those .vhds, without the notion of a
"whole disk", as in the Disk2vhd tool.
A .vhd file that captures a partition, is mainly of value for
mounting and subsequent file recovery. If you wanted to restore
a particular folder, mounting that .vhd would be the way to gain
access to the folder. But if you want a bootable environment, a P2V
approach may work better. If the Disk2vhd doesn't work, I suspect
there are other P2V tools out there.
Paul
