Solved How do i boot from a VHD?

[N00berG00ber]

ok so my windows went down yesterday, however when i tried to reinstall, it dident work. so i had to do a clean install. anyway, a while back i created a system image on an ext HDD. how would i be able to boot windows from that image (VHD) so i can recover some things?

 

[whs]

Best is to attach the VHD

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/566-virtual-hard-disk-create-attach-vhd.html

But you can also boot from a VHD

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/625-boot-vhd-using-windows-7-a.html

 

[Kari]

In addition to booting from the vhd, you can simply attach it in Disk Management in your new windows installation and extract what you need to: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/24771-system-image-extract-files-using-disk-management.html

Kari

 

[N00berG00ber]

Best is to attach the VHD

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/566-virtual-hard-disk-create-attach-vhd.html

But you can also boot from a VHD

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/625-boot-vhd-using-windows-7-a.html

ok, but in that tutorial, it says this "You Must reset your VHD VirtualOS configuration like HAL type and driver configuration or your VHD will fail to boot!!! It must be cleaned of VirtualOS configuration correctly before windows 7 can boot your VHD!!"

what does that mean? also, i need to boot from it because i NEED to run the services.msc app and my realtek app so i can write down their settings

 

[N00berG00ber]

ok so when I tried to boot form the VHD, it gave me the same error that I got when trying to restore from it? I guess that means the VHD is bad? how can I fix it?

 

[N00berG00ber]

this is the error im getting:

status: 0x000000f
Info: the configuration for an element within the object is invalid in the boot configuration data store


whats this mean? how can I fix?

 

[carwiz]

It means you can't boot from a VHD outside the guest machine.

I could be wrong but it sounds to me like you're trying to create a "walk around" Windows OS. What's up with that?

 

[N00berG00ber]

It means you can't boot from a VHD outside the guest machine.

I could be wrong but it sounds to me like you're trying to create a "walk around" Windows OS. What's up with that?

confused. alright ill explain again. I created a system image a while back of my PC so if it ever crashes, I could just restore it. welp, that day came yesterday. I tried to restore from the system image and it kept failing. so I decided to reinstall windows. now what I want to do is restore my EQ settings and my services startups. to do this I would like to boot my PC from that image I created (VHD) and write down my settings so I can later boot back into my normal windows and apply those settings.

the problem is that I get that error code when I try to boot the VHD.

 

[N00berG00ber]

ok I got it to boot to "starting windows" however it gave me a BSOD saying that the drive did not have enough space to expand the VHD, the drive its on has 30GB of free space. can I attach the VHD and shrink its size down to the size of the drive its on?

 

[whs]

Can you attach the VHD

 

[N00berG00ber]

Can you attach the VHD

yes. I just shrunk it. going to try booting from it now

 

[N00berG00ber]

ok yea it keeps BSODing saying my drive is not big enough. owell screw it. is there a way I can run services.msc from the VHD when attached so I can see my settings?