Make your Live system into a VHD

[aem]

I did the converter from xp boot, and it's the same. When turning on the VM, you get the screen boot manager like normal and selections as normal. Xp just doesn't boot. After selecting Xp, i can see the bar at the bottom running from left to right and that's it.

 

[huisinro]

ok, i assume your host is dual core, now you can try to configure the vm to have 2 vcpus, then it may boot, but no guarantee, since there are other stuff need to be adjusted too.

 

[aem]

Not sure what happened but i redid the VM creation, paid attention to the 2 vcpus, booted to xp and it works. I'm sure i had this setting before though. Let me see if having 1vcpu works or not?

Edit: it looks like changing the amount of vCPUs isn't a good idea from a stability point of view as advised in the setting itself. Getting BSODs but still about to boot both SOs. With 1 vCPU setting.

 

[Zealus]

Have an issue with this software. Created a VHD from my other laptop (it's a dual core, 2GB HP business laptop running XP) which resulted in 57GB file. When I attempt to load it as virtual machine (which is, if I understand correctly, is the point of Disk2vhd) on my main laptop (IBM/Lenovo T60p) the virtual machine window just sits there forever at the boot screen.

Apparently the software is working, so what am I doing wrong?

 

[huisinro]

As I mentioned in one of the previous messages, T60 is very tough, you will have to change the bios disk heads info in order to make it to boot. You can first try change vm's # of vcpus to 2, if still not booting, there might be some other things need to be tweaked.

 

[Zealus]

As I mentioned in one of the previous messages, T60 is very tough, you will have to change the bios disk heads info in order to make it to boot. You can first try change vm's # of vcpus to 2, if still not booting, there might be some other things need to be tweaked.

Guess I forgot to clarify - I am not trying to boot from that image, I want to run that as a guest OS on top of my existing Win7.

 

[huisinro]

yes , I understand that, you want to your old xp as vm using virtual pc on Windows 7. But you will need to modify the xp virtual disk file in order to make it to boot in a vm

 

[aem]

Have an issue with this software. Created a VHD from my other laptop (it's a dual core, 2GB HP business laptop running XP) which resulted in 57GB file. When I attempt to load it as virtual machine (which is, if I understand correctly, is the point of Disk2vhd) on my main laptop (IBM/Lenovo T60p) the virtual machine window just sits there forever at the boot screen.

Apparently the software is working, so what am I doing wrong?

I think i had the same issue at the start when booting to my Xp part of my dual boot. I'd say delete your VM and recreate a new one.

I can't remember if the giving the VM 2 CPUs helped or not but i recreated mine with 2 CPUs and it worked. Refer to my previous posts.

With my VHD i boot it off my USB HDD and it's fine. I'm not sure what Huisnro is refer to though.

 

[Zealus]

yes , I understand that, you want to your old xp as vm using virtual pc on Windows 7. But you will need to modify the xp virtual disk file in order to make it to boot in a vm

Can you provide a bit more details as to what needs to be looked at? What settings?

I have no previously created VM, all I did was run Disk2vhd on original laptop, attempted to create a new VM and attach this vhd to it.

 

[huisinro]

send an email to info AT remotesoft.com asking for MyOldPCs, i will send you a trial version, and it should work for you.

For T60, there are lots of things to modify, for example, you need to change the disk head number to 255 in NTFS boot sectors, which is not easy for you to do manaully. Other things, you need to disable intelppm.sys, etc.

 

[johngalt]

huis - thought you might be interested in knowing that TechTarget has taken up the cry for converting live systems to VHDs....based, it seems, on the same utility I wrote about.

Check out Converting Windows 7 deployment images to virtual hard drive files - I think you may be commenting there, eh?

Or do the issues mentioned in the previous posts not affect a conversion of a Windows 7 pre-installation environment?

 

[huisinro]

It seems that article are talking about Windows 7's native VHD boot, so the vhd file is used on physical machines, rather than on a virtual machine. These two types use same format, but quite different running environment.

 

[johngalt]

Ahh, I see the difference now.

 

[craigeve]

Hi - i'm interested in the virtual PC side of this too! I'm running a dual boot XP/Win7 system here and i'd like to run my XP boot as a virtual machine on my Win7 install.

I've used disk2vhd to create the image of the OS, but i can't make it boot - i get an error saying:

Cannot attach the virtual hard disk to the virtual machine. Check the values provided and try again.

I assume this is what others that have struggled have tried (Above) and i need to use the myoldpcs program mentioned? Or am i doing something wrong in the conversion/mounting process?

 

[aem]

Hi - i'm interested in the virtual PC side of this too! I'm running a dual boot XP/Win7 system here and i'd like to run my XP boot as a virtual machine on my Win7 install.

I've used disk2vhd to create the image of the OS, but i can't make it boot - i get an error saying:

Cannot attach the virtual hard disk to the virtual machine. Check the values provided and try again.

I assume this is what others that have struggled have tried (Above) and i need to use the myoldpcs program mentioned? Or am i doing something wrong in the conversion/mounting process?

You created your virtual system using disk2vhd, and you are trying to use it on what VM system? MS VM (eg virtual PC/Xpmode) or Vmware product?

I hope you are not trying to use your VHD on a VMware system

"Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). "

 

[HughShaw]

I hope you are not trying to use your VHD on a VMware system

I thought that VMware supports VHD format. It can certainly open them, but I haven't tried anything other than a XPM VHD.

 

[craigeve]

Hi - i'm interested in the virtual PC side of this too! I'm running a dual boot XP/Win7 system here and i'd like to run my XP boot as a virtual machine on my Win7 install.

I've used disk2vhd to create the image of the OS, but i can't make it boot - i get an error saying:

Cannot attach the virtual hard disk to the virtual machine. Check the values provided and try again.

I assume this is what others that have struggled have tried (Above) and i need to use the myoldpcs program mentioned? Or am i doing something wrong in the conversion/mounting process?

You created your virtual system using disk2vhd, and you are trying to use it on what VM system? MS VM (eg virtual PC/Xpmode) or Vmware product?

I hope you are not trying to use your VHD on a VMware system

"Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). "

Using the inbuilt Windows 7 Virtual PC. After going to the create a Virtual Machine option.

 

[gborn]

Not sure how valuable disk2vhd is ...

The discussion here about disk2vhd seems to be nice and appliable. But in reality, it is only useable under defined circumstances: a harddisc with one partition and a size below 127 GByte.

Here is what they say at sysinternals about the program:

"Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). "

The trap: Physical disk is not equal to a logical disc volume containing your win 7 installation. Most current systems are delivered with harddisks containing 1 TByte and more space. Hard disks are also partitioned (most W7 oem systems comes with 4 primary partition -> system reserved, windows system, backup/recovery, and "OEM-partition").

Cloning such a hard disk using disk2vhd is nearly impossible (or you need a second 2 TByte hard disk to keep your vhd-file). Why is it a problem to clone a runing Windows system to a vhd?

If you intend to clone a live system, you need only to copy the system reserved partition (if present) and the system partition to your vhd-file. Of course, you can uncheck all unnecessary logical drives in disk2vhd, before you invoke the copy process. In this case disk2vhd transfers only the contend of all selected drives to the vhd-file. But disk2vhd transfers also the whole partition structure to your vhd, independ from the logical drives you choose to copy. In consequence you will find a small vhd-file (maybe 20 or 30 Gbyte in size), containing the contend of all your selected logical drives. But the partition description of this vhd-disk says it is a "1 TByte disk with several partitions". This may cause some pitfalls. Here is, what I have found out in tests:

I used a machine with 1 TB hard disc, containing several partitions. Then I tried to clone the partition containing Windows 7 into a .vhd-disk. The results are pretty foolish:

- I tried to mount the resulting 20 GByte vhd-file on the same machine that has been used for cloning, using diskmanager. I received a warning, that the drive signatur conflicts with an existing disk. This is because the physical drive's signature and partition structure is identical to the id and structure of the vhd-disk. As a consequence, the mounted vhd-drive will be set "offline" (inaccessible). But there is a possibility to set the state of the vhd-drive manually to online.

- I tried to add the newly created vhd to my boot menu. A native boot failed with a blue screen (probably because the disc structure of your vhd conflicts with the disc structure of the physical disk).

- I tried to use the vhd-file as a disk for a virtual machine, using Windows Virtual PC, I got an error message, that an IDE-drive may have not 1 TB in size. The vhd-disk has only a size of 23 GByte, but the vhd-disk structure indicates a 980 GByte size.

Only booting the vhd in VirtualBox worked here "out of the box". But the Windows 7 clone runs realy slow - responses to mouse clicks are delayed, start menu wasn't useable etc. - an experience I made with several clones. Booting in VMware player failed also with a disc access error.

As a conclusion, I feel that disk2vhd will not be too helpful for real world use. I guess, I will give MyOldPC a try. Also the Paragon converter seems to do the job.