Installing Virtual Hard Disk on Windows 7

Nowadays, with the virtual machine technology, quite few things have changed. Microsoft is a dedicated follower of this technology having products like Virtual server and Virtual PC. With the help of this technology, users can now install operating system. All they need is a Virtual Hard Disk. The only limitation of using virtual technology in this process is that it does not allow users to access all the hardware like wireless, graphics and USB.

Windows 7 users can install the complete OS on one VHD file, before booting the computer. This enables the OS to originally run on the external hardware, which allows developers and administrators to try out various kinds of system configurations.

This also ensure that the user’s computer is no way impacted, thus minimizing all kinds of risks. This also facilitates in working constructively on the virtual disk without degrading your performance.

Before you initiate this procedure, it is recommended that you take a backup for all your important data like photos, business documents and others. This is important, as once the data is lost, it is quite difficult to retrieve it and there are chances that you might not get it back. You could store the information in any external hard drive or on a USB. You’ll also need to make free space of about 6 GB on your system, in order to install more applications if required.

Installing Windows 7 by using a virtual hard disk process

1. First step involves booting of the system. The users can either use a DVD or USB pen drive. As soon as the external device is connected to the main computer, ‘Install Now’ option pops up. It is recommended that you do not click on it and go to the command prompt mode by pressing shift-F10.
2. Once the command window crops up, you type the command Diskpart and click on Enter. The next step is to make a fresh VHD file. This is done by typing the following command.
3. Make vdisk file in path”D:\ToVhd.vhd” and then type expandable maximum and maxsizeInMegabyte
4. The next step involves adding a new VHD file to the physical disk in use, which can be done by keying in the command ‘attach vdisk’. Once this process has been completed, the user can exit from the command prompt, in order to proceed with installing of Windows 7 OS normally.
5. After the installation is complete, reboot boot the system. Once the system restarts, you’ll notice two Windows 7 copies in your system’s boot loader. Each of the instances has a specific description, and in order to change them, you could access the prompt command as an Administrator.
6. In the prompt command, you’ll need to type bcdedit /v, which will instantly show the entries in the system’s boot manager. Go through each of the entries thoroughly enclosed in {}. In order to change the description, you can enter the following command:
7. bcdedit /set {xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx} description “Windows 7 VHD”
8. After doing so, you need to restart your computer. On restarting, you’ll see the description of all the boot entries.

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