Dual Boot Windows 8

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Dual Boot Windows 8 from VHD using Windows

Setup

September 15, 2011 | SHANNON FRITZ | INFRASTRUCTURE

Are you running Windows 7 and have things just the wayyou like them, but youre really curious to

see how Windows 8 looks and feels? Using this method, you can boot your computer between your

existing Windows 7 installation or Windows 8 without needing to sacrifice disk space! Using a

Dynamic Virtual Hard Disk (VHD), you can install Windows 8 to a single file that is stored on your

Windows 7 file system, and then boot directly from that Virtual Hard Disk. This lets you choose to

load either your existing OS or the new Windows 8 at boot time. You are not doing an in-place

upgrade and you are not doing a rebuild. Its just a new install of Windows 8 and you dont have to

trash your existing setup to do it.

A couple notes before getting started

If you are using BitLocker on your windows 7 Computer, do not create the Windows 8 VHD on

your BitLocker encrypted volume. If all of your drives are encrypted, then you wont be able to

use Boot from VHD. Pausing BitLocker Encryption is not a workaround.

If you are using Windows XP as your current operating system, you cannot Boot from VHD, so

this method of Dual-Booting is not available to you. You can only (officially) use this on an

existing Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 computer.

When making the VHD, make sure the maximum size that you specify is less than the actual

size of your disk. For example, if you have a 60GB SSD drive, make sure the VHD Max size is

less than 60GB and not the 100GB I use in the example below.

Lets get started! If you havent already, download Windows 8 here and browse the

BuildWindows.com web site.

UPDATE: Ive added information about the new Consumer Preview build as well as how to

Remove the Dual-Boot option when youre done testing it. This process does work with the

Final / RTM of Windows 8 as well.

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On the computer which already has Windows 7 installed, boot from the Windows 8 media and youll

launch the installer. Before clicking Install Now, hit Shift+F10 and the WinPE command prompt

will appear.

Note: If you want to boot from USB instead of burning a DVD, you can use the very handy WUDT

tool from CodePlex which will make a bootable USB stick from the ISO for you.

Its time to create the VHD that will be your Windows 8 drive. Run diskpart from the CMD

window, then issue the following commands to diskpart:

1. list disk This shows your currently attached hard disks. In this example I only have one,

Disk 0.

2. select disk 0 You want to select the disk where youre current operating system (Windows

7) is installed, so if you have multiple disks available, you might use a different number.

3. list vol Show all the volumes that exist on that disk. Existing installations of Windows 7 will

usually have a 100MB volume that is the System Reserved partition (used as the boot loader

and leveraged by BitLocker) and then the actual OS volume is much larger. In example you can

see my Windows 7 volume is actually assigned to letter D (although when booting normally it

would be my C: drive).

4. create vdisk file=d:\Windows8.vhd maximum=100000 type=expandable This

creates a Dynamic VHD that can grow to ~100GB in the root of my Windows 7 partition. If

your hard drive is smaller than 100GB then be sure to use a smaller value for maximum that is

less than your actual disk size.

5. select vdisk file=d:\Windows8.vhd after selecting this vdisk, the following commands

will apply to it

6. attach vdisk The VHD will be mounted and the disk will be available to the windows

installer

7. exit were done with diskpart

All those commands will look like this:

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Now you can close the Command Prompt and return to the Install Windows wizard and clickInstall Now. When asked where you want to install Windows, you should see a newDisk 1 listed

with Unallocated Space. Youll notice that when you select this disk the installer will tell you that

Windows cannot be installed to this disk but the Next button is enabled. If you click Next, it will in

fact install Windows there just fine.

Once the installation is complete and your computer reboots, you will see a new boot loader that

asks you to Choose an operating system and you can select either the new install of Windows 8 or

your previously existing OS. The first time this appears you get about 3 seconds and it auto loads

Windows 8 to finish the setup. On subsequent reboots itll give you 30 seconds before auto selecting

it.




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Now you can browse around Windows 8 on your Native hardware! You can also still access files onyour Windows 7 disk. Open Explorer and youll see it appear as a different drive letter (D: in this

case) and you can browse around and copy/modify files as you wish.

Notice that the D: looks full? This is because the VHD you created for Windows 8 is reporting its

maximum size instead of its actual size. When you boot into Windows 7 youll see the VHD is

actually only about 8GB.

Are you all done with Windows 8 and cant figure out how to shut down? Take your mouse and

hover over the start button, or touch your mouse cursor to the bottom left corner of the screen and a

small start menu will appear. Click on Settings, then Power and choose Shutdown.




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Now you can enjoy the best of both worldsNjoy!

Microsoft released the Consumer Previewbuild of Windows 8 and I am happy to tell you that the

instructions above work exactly the same. I expect it will continue to work with all future builds of

Windows 8 as well.

The boot screen is a little different now in display but it otherwise works like the Developer Preview.

UPDATE: Windows 8 Beta




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One other note, the option to Shutdown in beta is no longer on a Windows button on the left.

Instead bump the bottom rightcorner of the screen and youll see a new Settings side bar where

Power -> Shutdown can be found.

Removing the Windows 8 Dual-Boot option is pretty straight forward. Just boot into your Windows

7 OS and start MSConfig.exe. From there, select the instance of Windows 8 and click Delete. Make

sure you do this from the OS that is installed on the disk and not the VHD!

After you delete it and reboot, you can delete the Windows8.vhd file.

UPDATE: How do you remove the Dual Boot option when youre done with it?

Shannon Fritz

Infrastructure Architect and Server Team Lead at Concurrency.

Shannon is an MVP in Forefront and Enterprise Security, MCSE in

Private Cloud and MCSA Windows Server 2012. He's also a self-

professed media junkie. Just ask him about MediaCenter!

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48 comments

Leave a message...

Best Community #Share

azzu

hi..... i did every thing u specified.... every thing went fine but during the final

stage of installation i m getting an error 'windows could not update the computers

boot configuration installation cannot proceed' pls guide me

0




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