Winning the “Boot from VHD” battle on Windows 7 + some useful utilities

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A year or so back I was using the Boot from VHD feature lots – but not in recent times and not with my current laptop configuration (Lenovo T61p with 2nd internal hard drive).

In readiness for the upcoming SharePoint 2010 training for UK ISVs in February I wanted to make use of a Microsoft created SharePoint 2010 VM, more specifically the VHD from the VM.

It has taken me three hours on and off to get it to work – which must warrant a blog post, if only so I can remember what I did a year from now!

My “battle” went thus:

Step 1: Try and remember how you did it last time

This was relatively easy as I recalled that Scott Hanselman had done a great post on this. This gives you the manual steps to get the job done but I felt that year on there must be an easier way.

Step 2: See if someone has made this easier with a utility

And indeed they have. ScorpioTek Solutions have created B2VHD Assistant which negates the need to worry about bcdedit and diskpart and instead simply fill in a GUI (Diskpart is used for creating a differencing disk for your base VHD which I would also recommend).

Step 3: Try and add the boot option using the Utility

Alas the Windows Boot Manager disliked the new entry I had added

The Error from the boot loader screen is:

“The configuration for an element within the object is invalid in the boot configuration data store. ”

with an error code of 0xc000000e.

I tried Step 3 a few more times and then gave up on the utility. To be clear, the utility actually works great. The issue is nothing to do with it and is resolved in Step 5.

Step 4: Go back to the manual process of creating a boot entry for the VHD

But this gave me the exact same issue at Step 3.

“The configuration for an element within the object is invalid in the boot configuration data store. ”

The manual process has lots more opportunities for operator error. Hence I tried Step 4 a few more times until I was convinced i could indeed type and the problem must live elsewhere :-)

Step 5: Bing search until you hit the gem that solves this

And thankfully I did. Brien Chistesen had just the post I was looking for. My VHD is on a second spindle (as Scott Hanselman recommends for BitLocker systems), and the second hard drive was not enabled for booting in the BIOS.  I went into the BIOS, into startup settings and added the secondary HDD. Simple.

Step 6: Boot from the VHD, smile and determine to write a blog post

Yep. That simple BIOS change solved it. I also spotted this other utility (iReboot) along the way which looks to be worth installing as it negates the need to watch over the reboot to select which OS to go with.

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  • I would also recommend you install VHDAttach to allow you to see into your VHD.