I set mine to NTFS - you can do as you so please. Some Windows 7 media (DVD, bootable USB, etc).ĮasyBCD from Neosmart Technologies (the 2.0 Beta is preferable).įirst, format the USB key. I decided there must be a way to copy the bootloader to a USB key, copy the VHD locally and boot from USB, then into Windows 7. Since the box was running Windows XP, the bootloader was old and didn’t support the new BCD-style bootloader found in NT 6+. This got me thinking…I knew that I could boot from VHD with Windows 7, so I decided to explore that angle. If only I could install Windows 7 on this loaner box…
Unfortunately, the Terminal Services client in Windows XP lacks two things: Support for Network Level Authentication (fixable with some registry keys) and, more importantly, lack of 2D acceleration found in the Windows 7 RDP client. Since I didn’t have time to copy the 70gb image, I copied it over to a Hyper-V server and fired it up.Īfter fixing the bootloader, I finally got my broken machine’s image running on the Hyper-V server. Using disk2vhd from Sysinternals, I took an image of my disk before packing it up. I’ve been using Windows 7 now since last summer, so I was less than thrilled to do without Windows 7. I got a loaner T410 from one of the guys which was, unfortunately, loaded with the standard image - Windows XP SP3. This leaves me without a machine for the next seven business days.
Windows 7 portable usb cracked#
My machine at work has a cracked case, so I had to send it back in for service today.