Hi all,

I just installed build 7000 of Windows 7 on a virtual harddisk. It works great and I like it because it doesn't waste space on my hard disk because its filesize is just as big as windows 7 on it requires. You don't need any extra partition..

But my question is whether someone has an idea how to put Vista or some legacy OS onto a vhd, attach them to the bootloader and boot from it.

I already tried it with Vista ... I created a vhd and installed Vista on it using Virtual PC. I attached it to the bootloader but I get an error when booting from it. Using the recovery dvd of Vista does not work because it doesn't know how to deal with a vdisk ...

Does someone have an idea how to boot Vista? Would be really cool to get this working!

Sibbl

you could install them in a vm than link up the vhd in the win7 vhd boot loader in disk management

Confused ....

You can open up the VHD with winimage and drop files in .... or are you talking about installing another OS, like Win 98? in the same VHD ....

Well the bootloader is really only part of the solution. You'd also need the ability in the OS itself to mount the system volume from a VHD located on a physical drive. I'm convinced that it's not possible for any other OS than 7 and possibly 7 server.

I was just researching this ...... you need to install your "Older" OS' into the VHD 1st then your final install will be Vista / Win 7 / WinSvr 08

otherwise you have to run bcdedit and manually add the OS like Win 2k or XP not sure about Win 9x

best to load XP 1st then from with in XP run the Win 7 installer, so it is aware of the other OS and can add the appropriate entries to the boot manager

have you by chance seen the x64 version of Win 7 Beta ver 7000

Have you done it? I find it hard to imagine that any os pre-7 will be able to mount a VHD as a system drive given how they don't support mounting them at all.

Doh .... I get it now, my mistake ...... I thought you were talking about installing into VPC ... and running multiple OS from the one image ...


Can you run Vista, from outside VPC off of a VHD ? how would the bootloader find it with out the OS

You can Use Vista Boot Pro as BCDEditor, It doesn the command for you while you work with an GUI.

Too bad the program is not free anymore (I still hava the free-edition and it should work with 7 too).

Gotta recommend EasyBCD. Been using it for a long time and it does the joib really well.

I don't use both ... i'm the type of person who wants to know what is happening in the background and so I use the way with the cmd

So yes I guess so too, that there's no possibility to run older OS in a VM ... I just asked whether anyone had heard or read something about it and now I know there's nobody having any idea about it ;D

btw Happy New Year ... Just came home today

This is really a throw-away comment;
[rant]
Why in Bloody Hell doesn't M$ Include a utility like this in the OS in the 1st place, instead these Cryptic CLI Commands ........
[/rant]

and to answer sibbl, I believe I saw something in M$ Technet pages about hooking into the new boot loader and running off of a VHD ... I'd say search there ... or use Google to Search there ...........

What do you mean by that? My post or the [rant] section of you're post.

Nope not you .... a comment about Microsoft ........