Restaged my laptop: Dual boot W2K8R2 and WIN7

After Windows 7 was officially released I was planning to reimage my laptop to the final version. I was running the RC all that time. Also I’d ordered a solid state disk to fit my laptop and when that package arrived I decided to pull the plug on my old laptop this weekend.

Intel X25-M Postville

After I’d read some reviews I had decided to order the Intel X25-M Postville SSDSA2MH080G2C1 80GB, which is about €200 here depending on where you buy it. I was tipped to watch for the G2 in the product number. G2 stands for generation 2 and the first generation had some issues.

Application Virtualization

When you are planning reinstallation of your pc it´s always a little bit scary. What information will I loose, what application do I need to install and (in my case) what configuration do I want to setup.

Luckily I try to use virtualized applications as often as possible which means that I have a library of about 30 sequenced applications that I recently use. I only have Microsoft Office, Microsoft Virtual PC and one or two other applications locally installed

I wanted to created to a dual boot system, being able to boot to both Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.

So I started by installing Windows Server 2008 R2 from USB key by following the instructions here. Simply read Windows Server 2008 R2 whenever Windows 7 is mentioned.

The result was a stunning install time of about 12 minutes!! Just to be clear this isn´t imaging technology. Just a regular next – next finish Windows Installation.

Windows 2008 as a workstation

Because I would be using Windows Server 2008 also a regular system I tweaked it a little to make it look and feel like a regular OS instead of a server OS. I enabled the Desktop Experience and Wireless features in Server Manager and followed some additional tweaking by using this article (like enabling Audio and no CTRL-ALT-DEL logon).

SSD Performance

I knew my new SSD was fast, but I wanted to check how fast it actually was. So I downloaded HD Tune (free) and did a test. The result was a very respectable average read speed of 175 MB/s (186 MB/s max) and an access time of 0.1 ms.

Next up was installing Windows 7 but I had only one disk (one partition) set up in my machine. Well since Windows 2008 and 7 now support the mounting of VHDs out-of-the-box I wanted to install Windows 7 in a VHD.

I enabled Hyper-V on my Windows 2008 installation and created an expandable HDD of 30 Gb on my machine (in C:\Windows7\WIN7ENT.vhd).

Install Windows 7 in to VHD

Next I followed the instructions here to install Windows 7 on to that Virtual Hard disk. Basically the steps provided were correct but I had to address some alterations.

At step 5 I could not connect to the Windows Server 2008 installation because it stated that the Recovery tools were not compatible with that particular installation.

I work around that issue (more by accident than intentionally) by selecting the other option in that screen: to revert to an earlier created image. It than stated that no images were found and asked to point to the image. I cancelled that window and found myself in the Recovery tool windows after all (step 6).

In step 7 I did not create a Vdisk, because I already created one in Hyper-V. So I simply did the steps:

select vdisk file = c:\Windows7\WIN7ENT.vhd
attach vdisk

and continued the setup of Windows 7. This setup also was mind blowing fast and installed under 10 minutes!

The end result is that I can dual boot between Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. I have two disks in Windows 7: a C-drive (which is the Virtual Hard disk) and a D-drive (which is the primary physical hard disk where Windows Server 2008 is installed). So I can share documents and data between the two Operating Systems through the physical disk.

When Windows 7 is looking at the virtual hard disk it sees it as a 30Gb disk (obviously) and it calculates the disk space with this number.The funny thing is though that when I look in Windows Server 2008 I suddenly have a lot more disk space available because the file now suddenly is only 7Gb.

Last but certainly not least I load my sequenced applications and can use them both on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. I actually created this blog post with a virtualized Live Writer which runs on both OSs.

And thanks to my colleague Patrick Damen for providing an install for all our corporate settings (like websites, rpc over http, certificates, backgrounds and themes etc.)

I hope this post helps some people when they decide to reinstall their machine at some point.