Creating a bootable VHD the easy way…continued

You might have read and tried the scripts from my first blog about creating a bootable vhd here, and in this blog post I’ll continue where I left with some information about my usage of difference discs and bootable vhd’s.

First of all I started by creating a bootable vhd with my script with the following options:

This left me with a vhd-file that took about 7Gb on my internal disc. I restarted my machine to make sure that my bootable vhd was working correctly.

After the health-check and some customizations like folder options in explorer I opened up a command prompt and entered shutdown /r /f, this way I don’t have to enter a reason to restart my Windows Server 2008 R2 OS

Back in Windows 7 I took these steps to create a difference disc to keep my base disc clean:

1. Start a command prompt as Administrator
2. Write BCDEDIT /v and hit enter
3. You will see the boot entries and their GUIDs
4. Write BCDEDIT /delete {guid to the entry with a the path to your bootable vhd}
   WARNING this will delete a boot entry, make sure you enter the GUID to the entry where the device/osdevice points the path of your bootable vhd. Entering the wrong guid could make your computer UNBOOTABLE.
5. Write DiskPart and hit enter
6. Enter CREATE VDISK FILE="<Path to difference vhd>" PARENT="<Path to parent vhd>"
   You must specify a valid folder name or you’ll get an error.
7. Write SELECT VDISK FILE=”<Path to difference vhd>” and hit enter
8. Write ATTACH VDISK and hit enter
9. Write Exit and hit enter
10. Write BCDBOOT <your assigned drive letter>:\Windows and hit enter
11. If you write BCDEDIT /v and hit enter you should see a new boot entry that points to your new difference disc.
12. Restart your machine and make sure that your bootable difference disc starts correctly.

When I get some time I’ll try to automate these steps into a handy batch-file or application. I hope you found this post interesting.

Cheers!

Hugo