Jon Galloway : Windows 7

My Boot-to-VHD experiment: found some tips, like it, but still haven’t found VM nirvana

Jon Galloway — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:57:00 GMT

Summary

Windows 7’s Boot to VHD works as advertised – native speed, virtual machine flexibility.
I came up with some tips and tricks which you might find useful
Having to reboot without hibernate to switch to the VHD machine means it’s a lot less useful than I’d hoped.

Background

I’ve recently been running some early releases developer tools which came with the “install on VM’s if you don’t want your computer to catch fire” warning. That seemed like a good time to back off on my “VM’s are for sissies” stance and get my VHD on. After verifying that there wasn’t already a suitable VHD available for download, I decided to follow Scott Hanselman’s directions to set up a Boot To VHD instance.

Here’s a very high level overview:

Download the wim2vhd script from CodePlex
Install the Windows 7 Automated Installation Kit (AIK)
Copy ImageX.exe from the the AIK install into the same folder as the wim2vhd script
Run the script
Mount the VHD in the Windows 7 disk management screen
Run some funky commands to make the disk bootable

There's a little goofing around at the command line, but it's only a few minutes if you follow the directions. Then your new VHD shows up as an option on boot.

BUT WAIT! I have a few minor modifications. Rather than write a complete walkthrough of the process – since Scott and others have done such a good job there – I’m just going to list some footnotes to the process. I’ve very roughly outlined the steps above; I recommend you read through the following list of tips, then go and follow Scott’s walkthrough and use any of the below tips you think are helpful.

Mod #1: Getting ImageX.exe without installing the AIK

There are copies of ImageX.exe floating around on the internets. I normally wouldn’t recommending using them, I only mention that because the AIK is 1.5 GB. If you’re one of those irrational people that thinks downloading 1.5GB to get a 471KB program, you could search around for “download imagex.exe” If you do that, the CRC for my my 32 bit ImageX.exe – version 6.2.7600.16385 - is 54 BF FA D5. Not recommended, but it is an option.

Note: Dear Microsoft folks that make gigantic SDK’s, please stop. Those might have made sense before the internet, but… c’mon now. Here’s how utilities should be done: live.sysinternals.com.

If you end up downloading the entire (1.5GB!!!) AIK ISO but hate installing a bunch of junk just to use one thing, you can open the ISO in 7-zip and find the find the ImageX.exe file, by looking for F1_imagex in Neutral.cab, like so:

Then you can just extract that file and rename it to ImageX.exe.

Mod #2: Changing the VHD size

The wim2vhd script defaults to a 40GB dynamic disk. Normally, I don’t really care much about the size of a dynamic disk, because the actual size of the VHD is only as big as the actual used space, and you can compact a disk to recover space as needed. However, when you mount a dynamic drive, the boot manager and host filesystem appear to reserve the maximum possible size of the of the disk – 40GB. In my case (on a laptop), that wasn’t going to work.

It’s not just a convenience thing, either – if you have a VHD whose maximum size exceeds the physical disk space available, you’ll get a blue screen of death:

(photo credit: Bart Lannoeye, see his post about the BSOD issue)

You can change the created VHD disk size using the /size parameter. For my Windows 7 + Visual Studio 2010 testing purposes, a 16GB disk seemed to work well. To do that, you’d call wim2vhd with this command:

cscript wim2vhd.wsf /wim:e:\sources\install.wim /sku:ultimate /size:16384

The size is calculated in MB, so you calculate it as 1024 * number of GB. A 20GB would use /size:20480

Mod #3: Rearming Windows to extend the evaluation time

If you’re using a virtual machine installation of Windows for temporary testing, you can use it without activation for 30 days. However, you can extend that evaluation period 3 times, giving you a total of 4 months, which is plenty of time for most evaluation purposes. It’s really simple:

Run "slmgr -rearm" from a command prompt with admin rights

This isn’t a hack – it uses a command that’s been shipped with Windows since Vista first came out. It’s not really news – Jeff Atwood wrote about it a while ago, and Ed Bott followed up with a cool tip on scripting that command to run every 30 days so you don’t forget. But it’s a really handy note, and it bears repeating.

Note: Apparently you can use the SkipRearm registry setting to extend that even further, but I don’t know if that’s covered by the EULA. I haven’t had the need to use a VM that long, so I’ve never run into that.

Mod #4 (untested): EasyBDC

You can apparently skip the rigmarole with BCDEDIT by using EasyBCD, because beta builds of EasyBCD 2.0 support the Windows 7’s VHD features.

Note: I haven’t done this. I’ve used previous releases of EasyBCD and haven’t had a problem, but I haven’t used EasyBCD 2.0 as it wasn’t out when I set up my VHD.

Mod #5 (untested): Disk2vhd

The SysInternals team recently released Disk2vhd, which can capture a disk image (while running) and create a VHD. I believe that in order to use the created VHD on the same machine it was created from, you’d first need to sysprep it, since otherwise you’re essentially trying to run two identical copies of the same operating system on the same computer, and you run into problems with drive paths. I haven’t tried this yet.

Gotcha #1: Go with Windows 7 Ultimate

Boot to VHD only works in Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise, not Windows 7 Professional. But you can’t use the Windows Activation re-arm trick we just talked about in Enterprise (since it uses a different licensing model). So I recommend that you go with Windows 7 Ultimate Edition.

Gotcha #2: Dual Boot means no hibernation

I use hibernation quite a bit, and only do a full reboot when I have to. So, for me, dual booting was inconvenient. It meant shutting everything down – including saving any tabs I happened to have open in IE8 (since tab saving in IE8 has been pretty unreliable for me) – in order to use the VHD partition, then shutting everything in the VHD partition down to switch back to the main one. That’s a lot of friction, and it ended up that I don’t use it as often as I thought I would.

As I write this, I’m setting up a VHD which I’ll just run under Virtual PC, because I can start it up without shutting everything else down. I still feel like it’s a great feature, just one that I’ll use less often than I thought.

Side note: Fast switching between boot instances would be a killer feature for Windows. I’d settle for multiple hibernation instances. I’ve read that it’s not enabled because of concerns over invalidating one hibernation instance while running the second machine instance, but I disagree – let me make that decision. At least give me a registry setting or something to enable it.

Windows 7 RTM – Faster Download, Better Upgrade

Jon Galloway — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 18:38:00 GMT

Here are some quick tips now that Windows 7 is up on MSDN:

Faster download

Download via the MSDN Top Downloads link instead of the MSDN File Transfer Manager. The MSDN Top Downloads are delivered via Akamai, and my download speeds jumped from 200KB/s to 2MB/s when I switched to it. (thanks to Greg Duncan for the pointer)

UPDATE: There’s also an Akamai link for Technet Subscribers.

Upgrade from previous Windows 7 installs

Contrary to popular opinion, you can upgrade from Beta or RC to RTM. It’s not officially supported, but it’s not a hack, either. There’s a single INI file you need to edit, and it put there for just that purpose. The Windows 7 team wrote about this on the Engineering Windows 7 Blog, and Lifehacker explained the steps a little more clearly:

Download the RC ISO and burn to a DVD.
Copy that burnt image to an external drive or a spare partition. [note – I just copied to a folder on the desktop of the computer I’m upgrading]
Find the sources directory, and open the file cversion.ini in your favorite text editor
To quote directly from Microsoft: “Modify the MinClient build number to a value lower than the down-level build. For example, change 7100 to 7000.”
Save the file, and then run setup as normal to start installation.

This sounds more complicated than it is – download DVD, copy files to the computer you’re upgrading, edit one line of a text file, and run the setup.exe. That’s it.

I’ve upgraded a machine from Beta to RC to RTM and it worked just fine.

Note that it's not officially supported, so if you have time to do a fresh install, I'd recommend it. The Beta->RC->RTM comes only with the Jon Galloway - Works On My Machine seal.

Pick the right version

I like the Windows 7 Edition comparison chart on Wikipedia – it’s does a good job of showing exactly what changes between versions.

Uninstall Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 (if installed) before upgrading

This would be a bit of an edge case, but since we’re talking about downloading from MSDN then it’s very possible that some folks have Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 installed on a Vista machine and want to upgrade to Windows 7. See Scott Hanselman’s post: Vista Users - Uninstall Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 before upgrading to Windows 7

This applies to Windows 7 RC as well, unfortunately. Scott's post points that out:

* You might be running Windows 7 RC and thinking to do an unsupported upgrade to Windows 7 RTM. If so, remember, it's not supported, but you'll have this problem upgrading too, so uninstall Dev10b1/.NET4 first.

About Upgrades

I’ve heard generally good things about the Vista –> Windows 7 upgrade. It didn’t work on my 2 year-old Vista install. Admittedly, that box is jam packed with random alpha software and I’d have been shocked if it worked. On the bright side, though, it cleanly rolled back and left me with my old Vista install.

I have upgraded two machines from Windows 7 Beta –> RC with absolutely no problems, and am getting set to upgrade them to RTM now.

Know what your license covers

The Beta test license covered pretty wide use, but the MSDN licenses are more strict. Technically, an MSDN licensed operating system can only be used for development, not “mixed-use” like games or e-mail:

Many MSDN subscribers use a computer for mixed use—both design, development, testing, and demonstration of your programs (the use allowed under the MSDN Subscription license) and some other use. Using the software in any other way, such as for doing email, playing games, or editing a document is another use and is not covered by the MSDN Subscription license. When this happens, the underlying operating system must also be licensed normally by purchasing a regular copy of Windows such as the one that came with a new OEM PC.

Note that the MSDN licenses does allow for “one copy of certain desktop applications on one device for any purpose”, those applications being mostly Office applications. But, as I read it, you’d need to install those Office apps on a non-MSDN licensed operating system.

I will be conducting random searches to verify that you are complying with this.

Got any more Windows 7 download/install tips to share?

Windows 7 Betta

Jon Galloway — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:58:48 GMT

I’ve been running Windows 7 Beta 1 for a week now and really like it. But I’d been looking at desktop for a few days before someone pointed out the little “desktop Easter egg”.

Here’s the desktop:

See it? Kirstin Juhl pointed it out on Twitter:

OK.... I just "got" the fish on Windows 7... it's a beta fish. I never would have put it together.... my 5year-old saw the screen and asked, "Is that a beta fish mom?" I looked and said "Ohhhh!!!"

Technically, it’s a betta fish, but I’m not going to quibble about that. So, enjoy the betta!