My New Windows 7 Setup booting from VHD (part 1)

I am building my new setup for windows 7. My idea is that I will have only a VHD with windows 7 on my laptop where I will boot from. My applications will be available through App-V, and will be on my Physical drive. Thus enabling me to swap OS-s without the hassle of reinstalling everything as soon as a new version of win 7 releases..

I started of by booting from DVD, during the first install window (just after selecting input locale and language, I did a <Shift>+<F10> this gave me the command prompt I needed. I opened Diskpart, typed: select disk=0 to select the physical drive in my Laptop, List Partition to see on which partition my current install is, select partition=2, formatted it,  Format.

When the format was ready, I created and attached the VHD file to install to: create vdisk file=”d:vhdwin7.vhd” maximum=17000 type=expandable  the vhd folder I create from command prompt, for I did not want my VHD in the root of the drive. I tried calling the VHD file Windows 7.vhd, windows_7.vhd, but I got errors telling me that the vhd cannot be installed in the windows folder. Wen I renamed the file win7.vhd everything went OK. so it seems that in diskpart the term windows is a reserved and protected term.

With select vdisk file=d:vhdwin7.vhd I selected the just created VHD file, and with attach vdisk I “mounted” the Vhd to make it available for the installation process. now I exited diskpart and the command prompt and got back to the installation process. from here is is just installation as usual, the only thing is: do a custom install and select the “disk” you just created.

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