This is the first of several planned posts based on knowledge gained at Tech·Ed last week – but this one is necessarily brief. Mark Minasi, who presented the session that this content is based on, owns the copyright on the materials he presented (although Microsoft still distributed them to delegates). Consequently, I can’t write his session up as fully as I would like; however this post captures some of the key points (along with some narrative of my own) as I see nothing that’s not already in the public domain (and some of which has already been written about on this blog). The value in Mark’s presentation was that it pulled together various items of information into one place and explained it in a way that was simple to follow – consequently I’m not repeating the full details, just the high level overview, with some extra links where I feel they add value (Mark seems like a decent fellow – he’s only trying to protect his income and I suspect the real problem would be if I presented his materials as my own – I’m sure he would understand the fine line I’m attempting to walk here):

• The session was titled “How Windows Storage is Changing: Everything is going VHD (CLI302)” and that’s pretty spot on – the virtual hard disk (.VHD) file format allows an entire disk partition (but not a whole drive with multiple partitions) to be packaged in a single file complete with folder structure and NTFS permissions: Microsoft’s Storage Server uses .VHD files for iSCSI targets; Windows Backup has been able to perform completed PC backups to .VHD files since Vista; and with Windows 7 we have the ability to natively boot Windows from a VHD file. Just to be clear – this is not client/server virtualisation (as in with a hypervisor) – this is storage virtualisation (presenting the VHD container as as a logical volume, stored on a physical disk).
• To understand native .VHD booting, it’s useful to understand recent changes in the boot process: boot.ini is no more – instead we have a Boot Configuration Database (BCD) and a system reserved partition (incidentally, that’s the same one that is used for BitLocker, and is automatically created in Windows 7, with no drive letter assigned).
• Running Windows Backup from the command line with wbadmin.exe requires the use of the -allcritical switch to ensure that the System Reserved partition is backed up.
• As Mike Kolitz described back in May, access to .VHD file contents from Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 is provided by a completely new mini-port driver in the storage stack for VHD files. This VHD driver enables requests to files in the VHD to be sent to the host NTFS file system on the physical partition where the VHD file is located. VHD operations can also be performed on a remote share.
• The steps for creating a .VHD file, attaching (mounting) it, assigning a drive letter and formatting the volume can be found in my previous post on running Windows from a USB flash drive (as well as elsewhere on the ‘net).
• The diskpart.exe command can be used to view the details of the VHD once mounted (detail disk) and it will be identified as a Msft Virtual Disk SCSI Disk Device.
• The System Reserved Boot Partition may populated using the bcdboot.exe command. After this partition has been created, the remainder can be partitioned and formatted, then a pre-configured .VHD can be copied to the second (non-system) partition. After editing the BCD and rebooting, the physical drive will be something like D: or E: (depending on the presence of optical drives) and the .VHD will be C:.
• There are various methods for creating a pre-configured .VHD, including booting a reference PC from Windows PE and using imagex.exe (from the Windows Automated Installation Kit) to capture the disk contents to a .WIM file, then mounting the target .VHD and deploying the .WIM image to it. Alternatively, there is a SysInternals tool called Disk2VHD.
• The changes to the BCD are also documented in a previous post on this site but Mark also highlighted the existence of the [locate] parameter instead of specifying a drive manually (James O’Neill uses it in his post on booting from VHD and the joy of BCDEdit).
• There are GUI tools for editing the BCD, but bcdedit.exe is worth getting to know:
  

  “The GUI BCDEdit commands are rather like having a 3 metre ladder for a 5 metre wall” … “Step into the light, come to the command line, in the command line there is freedom my friends.”

  [Mark Minasi at TechEd Europe 2009]

• Booting from VHD is a great feature but it does have its limitations: for instance I can’t use it on my everyday notebook PC because the current release doesn’t support hibernation or BitLocker.
• To finish up his presentation, Mark demonstrated an unsupported method for installing Windows directly to .VHD: Run Windows setup and press shift and F10 to break out into a command prompt; wipe and partition the hard drive, creating and attach a new .VHD; ignore Windows setup’s protests that it can’t be installed to the .VHD – click the Next button anyway and it should work (although it may be patched in a future release).

Finally, if the contents of this post are interesting, this blog recently featured two guest posts from my friend and colleague, Garry Martin that build on the concepts described above: in the first post, Garry described the process for booting Windows 7 from VHD on a Windows XP system; the second went deep into an unsupported, but nevertheless useful, method for booting Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 from a VHD on removable media… perhaps a USB flash drive? There are also some useful links in Mike Ormond’s post on native VHD booting and Jon Galloway has a whole bunch of tips even if he is still searching for his virtual machine nirvana.