how to boot vhd created by disk2vhd

Well I downloaded vmconerter and vmplayer and I'm now running the XP SP3 from my old PC (set disk size down to 112GB CPU is old single core) on my new WIN7 x64 Ultimate. Bit sad that disk2vhd was such a flop as sysinternals stuff normally "just works"  I'll keep monitoring this thread and try any suggestiions.

> Created a new VM in Win7 VPC, attached the VHD (output of VhdResizer).

Did you do this "create" using the Start menu entry. All Programs->Windows Virtual PC->Windows Virtual PC  This menu entry points at %SystemRoot%\system32\vmwindow.exe

this brings up a special explorer window with  a "Create virtual Machine" option

I then specify virtual machine name, memory and "Use an Existing virtual hard disk"

I press Create and immediately get
Cannot attach the virtual hard disk to the virtual machine. Check the values provided and try again

This question specifically relates the virtualising an current copy of XP and moving to WIN7

Thanks All

Well, for what it is worth, I got this tool to work great with a little effort...

I was migrating a Athlon 64-X based XP-SP2 system to a VPC on my Windows 7 (Ult-64) W3570 based box so I could re-purpose the XP box for Windows Home Server...anyway...

I was running into the problem that my HDD was 300 GB.  So these are the steps I had to go through:

Copy files to another HDD to get under 100 GB.
Run Perfect Disk defrag to get all the data at the beginning of the drive.  Not sure if this step was required...
Run Paragon Partition Manager from a boot recovery CD to resize the original partition to 111 GB. (can't have any other partitions on the HDD for it to work - all other space must be free and unpartitioned).
Run disk2VHD to create a VHD (only c drive checked, checked fix up HAL for Virtual PC) directly to an attached USB hard drive.  Had to disable Virus scanner and most other tray programs to prevent it from BSOD halfway through.
Moved USB drive to Win7 computer.
Installed and ran VhdResizer from vmToolkit to reduce the size of the VM from 300 GB to 112 GB (assume I could have done this on the original PC but I didn't).
Created a new VM in Win7 VPC, attached the VHD (output of VhdResizer).
Ran fine, had to reactivate XP, which I was afraid would fail but it seemed to work fine.
Installed integration features.
Upgraded to SP3 (needed for the AutoPublish feature)
Installed update to enable RemoteApp on VM located here (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2f376f53-83cf-4e5b-9515-2cb70662a81b&displaylang=en).
Now I can run my old programs directly from Win7.

Thanks for the app...worked great for me with a little elbow grease.  Hope this helps someone...




Edited by kkwst2 - 21 December 2009 at 5:10am

What I'm saying is the disk arrangement is important i.e. 2 drives or 1 drive 2 partitions because the bootloader will have trouble locating the Operating System.
You can keep the existing layout however you would need to use bcdedit to make XP bootable from Vista's bootloader.
Personally I think splitting the 2 Operating Systems to 2 VHD image files would make things a lot less complicated.
If you save XP partition to a single VHD then you will need to use the Recovery Console with the following commands to make the drive bootable: fixmbr and fixboot

Richard S.

Edited by redhawk - 15 December 2009 at 12:35am

If your machine has 2 hard drives then you must create 2 separate VHD files otherwise you'll have a hard disk image with 2 partitions.
It should still be possible to dual boot XP / Vista with only 1 virtual hard drive Vista's bootloader is capable of starting XP you just need bcdedit.exe to set it up.

Richard S.