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I have a bootable VHD that I use on my laptop. I recently bought a desktop and would like to use the VHD on the desktop now rather than on the laptop. I copied the VHD to my desktop's hard drive and created the BCD entry. When I boot my computer and select to boot from the VHD I see the Windows7 spinning "bubbles" which is immediately followed by a blue screen and the computer restarting.

Should it generally be possible to use the VHD copied from my laptop or are there restrictions that would prevent this? If it should be possible, what could be causing my BSOD? I can't see the error message I'm getting as it restarts so quickly.

UPDATE: The error code when booting from the VHD is: 0x0000007b

Thanks.

b3n
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  • Are you trying to use the VHD as a normal harddrive or still running it through another system? – Doktoro Reichard Aug 18 '13 at 22:49
  • I just want to boot to the VHD as I used to do on my laptop. It's not attached as a HDD, if that's what you mean. The laptop had Win8 as the main system and the Win7 VHD. My desktop is also running Win8 as main. – b3n Aug 18 '13 at 22:56
  • So, having figured this out, maybe there's some hardware difference between your laptop and your desktop that prevents Windows 7 from running correctly. Knowing the BSOD would go a long way, but you say it disappears shortly. Maybe you could check the event logs or the dumps for some info, but other than this, I can't recall anything more to help. I suggest rephrasing your question a little, as it IS possible to copy VHD's ([link](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHD_%28file_format%29#Native_VHD_Boot)), being your problem the fact that after copying to your desktop, you can't run. – Doktoro Reichard Aug 18 '13 at 23:07
  • Thanks. I have already changed the title of the question a few minutes ago. I'll see if I can get to the dump logs inside the VHD. – b3n Aug 18 '13 at 23:10
  • Do it again and start pressing F8 about once a second until you get a boot menu. Find "Disable automatic restart", after selecting that start windows normally. Now write down the stop code and post it here. – cybernard Aug 18 '13 at 23:20
  • Thanks for the advice cybernard. The stop code is 0x0000007b. – b3n Aug 18 '13 at 23:38
  • Just so you know Windows 0x0000007b error is related to the hard drive mode setting the computer BIOS settings ATA, AHCI, or SCCI. Apparently the system you moved to virtual machine to had a different BIOS setting than the old laptop. –  Sep 13 '14 at 16:57

2 Answers2

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You can use the VHD on your other computer in a virtual environment such as VMware.

How to do it: https://superuser.com/a/571912/210682

Windows 8 was the first Windows version that supported to be used with different hardware, so if you had been running Windows, you could have easily copied the VHD. I've been doing it plenty of times. The only time when you can actually copy a Windows 7 based VHD is directly after deploying the vanilla installation before the hardware is recognized and installed.

You could try to remove the unnecessary drivers of the old system and install the necessary ones for the new computer before copying it over. That should work, too.

Community
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Zerobinary99
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As it seems to be quite complicated to copy VHDs between computers due to them being tied directly to the underlying hardware I have decided to create a new VMWare virtual machine to be used on both my laptop and desktop.

See this link for reference: VMWare Workstation Moving a Virtual Machine

b3n
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