Rob's Blog

For the last week or so I’ve been playing around with Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Virtualization component of Windows Server 2008 R2. For those of you that haven’t used or heard of RD-V, it’s Microsoft’s free VDI offering, utilising Remote Desktop to initiate a connection and spin up a dedicated Hyper-V Virtual Machine for the user. Anyway, one thing that really bugged me was that I couldn’t get Aero Glass to work, no matter what I did. Everything I read said it should work, but it didn’t. Why not? Well, the answer was both simple and irritating. Aero Glass remoting doesn’t work under anything other than Windows 7 Enterprise or Ultimate.

This annoyed me immensely – why not include it in Windows 7 Professional?

In my last post I wrote about how to install Windows Server 2008 R2 into a VHD for dual-booting purposes. Well, recently I broke my laptop and had to rebuild my boot loader. Anyways, adding an existing VHD to the Windows 7 boot loader is a doddle.

First, copy your current boot loader:

bcdedit /copy {current} /d "Boot Description"

This will generate a new boot entry and print out the GUID. You’ll need this! Next, you’ll set the VHD path for the OS to use.

bcdedit /set {GUID from last step} osdevice vhd=[DriveLetter:]\PathToVHD\VHD_File
bcdedit /set {GUID from last step} device vhd=[DriveLetter:]\PathToVHD\VHD_File

That’s it! Reboot your PC and your VHDs should be bootable. Remember though, you can only boot Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 VHDs like this.

I’ve been using Windows 7 as my primary OS on my laptop (a nice shiny new Dell Studio 17) for a little while now. I’ve found it almost as stable as Vista, definitely faster and some of the new features are very useful – the wireless connection stuff is much better for example. However, the lack of any hypervisor-based virtualization product with it means I have to use Windows Server 2008 for many work-based things.

Now, with both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, you can boot from a VHD file. Why is this great? Well, my laptop only has one disk partition and I can’t be bothered to resize it (and no, using DISKPART doesn’t work – I have 0B available to shrink). It also means that I can stick in my USB stick with the Windows Server 2008 R2 install files on, open a command prompt (using SHIFT+F10 when the first dialog box pops up) and type:

diskpart
create vdisk file=D:\VHDs\Win2k8R2.vhd type=expandable maximum=32768
select vdisk file=D:\VHDs\Win2k8R2.vhd
attach vdisk
exit


I can then continue the install – it does complain about not being able to boot from this volume, but don’t believe it. Just press next and the whole thing works like a dream.